Featherkisser
by HospitallerInaBoat
Summary: Contractors, murderous hinge-heads, gunfire, and screwing a bird in a car. Let the feathers fly. AU (M!Human x F!Skirmisher/Kig-Yar)
1. Chapter 1

_**REFORMATTED**_

_**This depicts graphic interspecies hip-dancing between a human dude and T'vaoan Kig-Yar girl (Skirmisher from Halo Reach) -if that bothers you, go scram before you dirty your blouse. On the contrary, if you're into that sort of thang', then boy have I got good news for you...**_

**_Find me on my galleries on Deviantart, FurAffinity, Wattpad, P treon and Twitter_**

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**Featherkisser**

**1**

* * *

**_"Aren't the voices of birds so pretty when they sing? What about when they sing out of joy? What about out of PLEASURE...?"_**

* * *

"This isn't the right _grip_." Yamva snapped, his voice ringing metallically within the cauterized interior of his head's prison. "I even spoke slowly that time. Repeat it with me; _Size-Six, Teeth Number Sixteen._"

He made sure to duck below the edge of the vent arch as he leaned back to further his beratement. The spines sticking from his head didn't make it easy.

"_Six. Sixteen._ The words even sound the same. They're simple. They're _quick._ They're common too. Don't tell me you haven't-" Yamva stopped himself. He was using too big of words again.

After a pause, he took a second to lick his fangs, and quirked a musing, yellow eye in the darkness of the night.

"…_Ah,_" He chuckled into the crisp wind, forming the edges of his snout into a leery grin. "-this was all part of the plan."

"_Plan~?_" –Came an excited trill from his south. Yamva felt his veins freeze, and ground his teeth inside his maw as a result. "What plan you mean? There no plan! Plan _bad!_ Plan what Old People used to do! I never have plan for that reason."

"_Ah,_" Yamva- still refusing to make eye contact with the other speaker –nodded sagely in the cool air. His spines quivered with anticipatory guile and his fingers twitched against the edges of the vent portal. He glanced at the machine and tapped his talons. "…_yes,_ yes I know."

"Plan always bad." His shrill sounding companion squeaked, ripping the wrench from his claw without so much as a flinch. "I reason it like this; keep throwing part and part at it, until one part fits, and problem solved."

"So you consider yourself a _chancer?_" Yamva scratched an itch under his jaw, quirking a yellow eye at his only company with a disparaging glow.

"Chancer and lucky." Yamva couldn't outwardly tell, but he had known Taptap long enough to be able to discern when the little Unggoy was smiling. Right now, the edges of Taptap's rebreather mask were at just the right tilt, and so that meant it was undoubtedly so. Taptap was beaming, oblivious, as he shoved the grip-wrench back into the box, and tugged out a fresh one. "Try _this_." –The Unggoy chirped.

"That isn't necessary." Yamva tiredly grinned.

"Why?"

"Look at the handle for me."

"It say… _f-fer… four-t-teeee- Sixteen~!_" The Unggoy stuck the wrench back in his face, waving it like it was a children's toy. "See? I can do good still."

"You are a dimwitted imbecile." The Kig-yar engineer spread his chops, and grinned with the viscosity of an appeased predator.

"Thanks, Yamva! I respect you too." Taptap nuzzled at him underneath his mask. Anyone else would've taken the little gas-sucker's words with a heavy dollop of flavored sarcasm. But Yamva knew better. Taptap was entirely too serious.

To Taptap, Yamva was always the patriarch. He was always the kind-hearted hero, the supporter, the guide through thick and thin. Yamva held no doubts that he could've literally shot the Unggoy in a non-lethal method of targeting, and Taptap would've stood right back up, dusted himself off, wrapped the wound and said- '_Thanks, Yamva~!_' –without hitch or pause.

As Yamva glowered at the diminutive little alien before him, he found his eyes wandering with opaque interest to the space directly behind Taptap's position. The Kig-yar's smile faltered, and he felt his beak twitch. The opportunity was almost enough to illicit an avian-born chatter from his teeth.

All it would take was a _kick! _Just a little kick. Then Taptap, bane of his world, would tumble down the basalt cliffs and never be heard of again.

As if the water was beckoning him, the lime-run falls seemed to roar louder in the backdrop, and the yellow waters below shimmered like gold. The heavens could not have influenced reality any further to seduce him into the act.

_But who would hand me my wrenches?_

"Get yourself better eyes." The Kig-yar gingerly dipped one of his claws into the toolbox, and retrieved the proper fit that he sought. A little silvery wrench, with the text reading _Six-Sixteen –_etched into its handle. "I'll ask you this, and- don't lie to me –have you been reading those pages?"

Yamva gripped the vent portal and stuck his head back inside the cauterized, funny-smelling interior of the burn tank again, not waiting for the Unggoy to conjure a response.

"Pages… _confuse._" Taptap knelt by the toolbox, and he firmly placed his chitinous claws on his narrow little hips. Yamva could hear the tension in his trilly voice. The Unggoy hadn't been doing what was requested of him.

_It is like mending a hatchling,_ the engineer realized with an annoyed grin as he turned the wrench. _The moment your eyes linger, will the chicks bite, tumble and defecate in all the wrong places. Reminds me of home._

Was that a bad or a good thing? Yamva honestly didn't know. Though, there wasn't much incentive for him to care, anyhow. Yul-Bi was a time of past-pleasures and a past-life. That asteroid habitat didn't have anything for him anymore. _Taptap_ was more of a crux than it had ever been.

_How disgusting._

Modern racism dictated that the two of them should have hated one another. But the workings of fate were strange, as it seemed. Yamva wasn't about to be rid of Taptap anytime soon, and the isolated, semi-brainwashed Unggoy didn't appear to mind that matter. What use was there in undoing the last eight years?

_None._ Yamva grit his fangs and twisted, until the metal lurched, and the interior plate was rigid as stone. _I have to keep telling myself that. Why do I keep telling myself that? I tell everyone things they already know. Just like I keep telling _them_ that these burn-tanks are bad. They're really bad. They're expended. They die too easy._

"-_and they would be cost-effective to fix…_" –He grumbled out loud, his voice echoing around inside the burn-tank's crusty hold. "-_But what does Yamva know? Yamva knows nothing. Yamva's just the Grunt-Herder, and the Methane-Whisperer. Yamva has no expertise. None at all. Yamva has no-_"

**_Clunk~! _**–he bumped the back of his narrow, tannish skull against the upper rim of the vent portal. It bent some of the spines there the wrong way and made him grunt.

Taptap didn't seem to process the origination or purpose of the following torrent of Kig-yar-tongued vulgarity that slipped like a trail of proverbial sewage from Yamva's teeth. The burn-tank clanged and thrummed as the reptile alien climbed out of it, and slammed the vent portal shut with an audible swing of his palms.

**_Bang~! _**–went the rims of the hatch. It drowned out the climax of Yamva's cursing, even though he knew Taptap couldn't understand a word he was saying.

_I hate pale-speak._

"You okay, Yamva?" The Unggoy squeaked behind him.

"_Peachy._" Yamva slapped his chops afterward. He had been hoping to feel slick for his dexterous usage of humanity's idioms, but for some reason, the word had sounded… _wobbly._ It didn't belong in his mouth, he figured. Or maybe he had finally suffered a fair concussion from hitting his fat head on the portal.

By _Sul-Yiig _that had freaking hurt! Not that it was within the point.

"I am fine." The engineer licked his fangs again, looking down at the smaller alien by his backward-angled heels. Taptap only came up to his wiry, gobbly chest, and did not go higher in terms of headroom. The triangular standard-issue tank protruding from Taptap's back, however, almost completely matched Yamva's stature. The Kig-yar craned an eye at it with menace.

_I consider it second nature that I can fantasize what would happen if I ripped it off of him._

"You are best, Yamva." The Unggoy dumbly chirped, picking up the toolbox by his cloven foot.

"I know." Yamva smiled. He was internally cackling. His made-up avatar of Taptap was writhing on the ground as the last of the methane in his mask ran out. The little fucker was suffocating. It was like listening to a field-rodent being pulled in two at the hip.

_The squeals, mmmha-ha~…._

"That last burn-tank." Taptap's pudgy little fingers were dancing on a holo-pop slate tied over his armored wrist. Yamva thought about screaming at him and throwing him into the lime-falls below them, but saw to his chagrin that the slate was coded in Taptap's native rune-alphabet, some bastard-language from Balaho of ages' past. "We done now! We get them all."

Taptap lowered his arm and beamed at the engineer again.

"We best." He marveled quietly.

"I _know._" Yamva smiled wider. Licking his teeth, the Kig-yar sneered at the burn-tank as it began to hum and growl. For good measure, he gave the vent hatch a switch kick, causing a metallic _thwack~! _–to echo around the chamber and over the yellow water. "That should keep the machine from dying on us. Read my teeth; I cannot promise that."

"I read." Taptap nodded eagerly whilst the two of them turned to start back the way they had come. "You not fear height much, Yamva?"

"No." Yamva kept his balance, casting a long glance over the side of the natural bridge they traversed. The rocks were mossy enough that it was fortunate of them to possess cloven heels in the case of Taptap, and barbed toes in his own lobby. If one of them slipped and fell, it was a nearly sixty-foot drop to the yellow lime-waters below, and that was assuming they reached the water itself without plowing into the myriad rock formations sticking from the waves like angry guardians.

Listening to the salty spray of the mineral pond made his hearing-holes itch. Yamva was more of a man to find consistency in blaring techna-tunes from his homeworld, not the soothing whisper of nature. Though, he supposed the music would simply distract him on jobs like this. He didn't want to die, and so nature and its eccentricities would have to do.

_There's always that chance._

Yamva chewed his reptilian tongue as he eyed the Unggoy's back and imagined it submerged in the water.

_Just a kick._

His foot itched.

_This was all Kuhaga's idea anyway._

The Kig-yar's teeth chattered in a momentary lapse of control. He scratched at his ankle, taking care to not lean too far in his bids for balance.

_All part of that plan,_ he eyed Taptap again, waddling on the mossy walkway of natural stone, much like a fat toad. _Everyone in this dig hates me._

-Except for Taptap, ironically, that gas-sucking little shit couldn't get enough of the engineer.

"Yamva my buddy!" He'd squeak at the other diggers, making them snicker, laugh, cackle. All Yamva could do was walk away and hide. "We best friend."

_Parasite._

Yamva chattered again as the walkway began to draw to a close. It wavered out triangularly for a dip in a spanning, developing plateau. They passed over a crag of subterranean coastal cliffs that scabbed down to the wavering, yellow waters below.

_Maybe the rocks would do it._

"Plassy-stuff flow good again, right, Yamva?" Taptap gazed at him quaintly over the pyramid-shaped tank bolted to his rear harness. For just a moment, the Kig-yar engineer was distracted from his consistent thoughts of homicide, and conceded a tiny grunt.

"The plasma is fixed," He paused, and looked back at the little natural bridge they had crossed, and were leaving behind. "for now."

Gingerback Cave sprawled like a vast dome around them, its ceiling dark, and toothed, much like a shadowy leviathan's mouth. Cramped ulcers and divets worn into the limestone high above birthed consistent and constantly whispering falls of tinny, piss-colored water. Sometimes, even the steam wafting from where these falls made contact with the mineral-waves below was yellow too. Everything in here resembled sulfur to him, and was indifferently ignored by Taptap.

What sort of name _was_ Gingerback anyhow?

_Ginger-back?_

Human terminology escaped him.

"Yamva?" The Unggoy continued to pester him as they walked.

"What?" He lazed his yellow eyes up at the ceiling, staring at the yellow falls, and the yellow-tinted limestone, with an emotional tint that he would describe as… _yellow._

Everything was yellow these days.

Too much damned yellow. He hated it here.

"You quiet." Taptap observed, his little cloven feet patting onto the mossy earth below him. "Tell me another story!"

"Pirate Queens of old, listen here; I am in no mood for _stories._" Yamva squinted at some of the steely, iron-tinted pipes that snaked like serpents among the giant cavern's roof, down some of its flanking walls, and into the yellow mineral waters below. They hummed and thudded silently in the din of the falls' many utterings. "Don't you get enough stories? What a hatchling! Who listens to this many stories and cannot feel sick about themselves afterwards?"

"…_Erhm…_" Yamva almost bumped into the little squatter for how much he'd slowed down. The Kig-yar clicked his avian tongue. Evidently, he'd spoken too fast for Taptap _again._

"Find another _hobby._" Yamva cruelly simplified, his long snout highlighted oddly by a cluster of pylon-shaped worklights that had been stabbed via stake into the earth nearby. "By most standards, you shouldn't even _be here, _forgetting any stories I may or may not tell."

"…By _standard_," Taptap took a second to clear his throat, but he did speak with calculation- albeit improperly, with butchered English –to the Kig-yar. "-galaxy say we both hate each other. Old People say, we _meant_ to hate each other_. _I say, I disagree that."

Yamva was so surprised by the Unggoy's words, that he squawked, and the bird-like caw echoed around the entire cavern.

That was perhaps the most socially rebellious, intelligent thing he had ever heard the Unggoy say in his entire life. Yamva almost cooed in agitation. He was a man who had always based his experiences on vivid memories, in that, important, altering events were always branded in his mind to the very end.

The tree that his father had first beaten him under when he was a hatchling, and the grove surrounding it, all permanently embroidered into the proverbial silk of his soul, for example. The hut he had lived in for twelve whole cycles, with Rykol, his former mate, another thing branded in his brain's eye.

_Now,_ the first time the only companion he had left, had first shown guile. It was yet another unpleasant environment, in an unpleasant place, painfully and _unpleasantly_ scalded into his scalp, much like a scar.

Yamva had been grinning, but that expression died in place of a sour scowl.

He had brief periods where he forgot how much he hated his life. They were the most blissful seconds he had ever managed to snatch out of the doomful haze that was his existence in this galaxy.

_That is what I receive for chasing the money._

He looked down at Taptap, and now it was his fingers that were twitching. There was a sidearm latched to his equipment belt. It was a plasma pistol, an older model from the Pre-War years. It was a damned antique, but he knew the thing still worked. He wondered what sound Taptap's head would make if a bolt hit it. It would probably be like watching a ripe melon pop.

"You're not as dumb as you look." He said out loud.

"Thanks, Yamva!" Taptap chirped, lugging the little toolbox with him.

"You need to read more of the pages." Yamva berated a second later, swatting the Unggoy on the back of his fat little head. Taptap yipped. It almost sounded like he was giggling. "A youngling could read these tool labels better."

"Yes, Yamva." Taptap nodded.

"And stock your tank," Yamva roughly shoved the top of Taptap's triangular spine-mount. "you're alone out here, and you'll run out."

"Yes, Yamva."

"And finally," The Kig-yar picked at an irritation by one of the spines jutting from his arm. "-tell no one of our discussions."

"Yes, Yamv-" Taptap paused. "-Why?"

"Because," The engineer shivered, like a cool gust of wind had brushed off his leathery skin. "it's _embarrassing._"

* * *

{👾}

Gingerback was accessible through the Crag Belt, a cavernous trench that was wrought for approximately six thousand, four hundred and forty-five miles up and down the western hemisphere. It was the largest of the planet's trenches, and the widest, being thirty-six miles wide at its biggest tectonic gap.

She didn't have to watch over that much space, however. The digsite did not extend that far. It only covered Gingerback, Spine and Alpha, three chambers, separated by a tumbling gap of a mere _mile_ over an endless pit of nothingness. It was all black when you looked over the sides of the many natural walkways, ridge highways and peninsula bridges. But looking ahead, everything was _brown,_ and scabby, patterned almost like a gigantic wall made of shag-carpet, or perhaps animal fur.

Kel-Yn-Gor could never decide on her own facts of the matter. She supposed it was up for interpretation. Inside the scope, the cliff walls opposite her position looked furry. Outside of it, and they looked cleaner, slab-ish and scaling.

Of course, this was nearly a thirty-six hundred foot drop from the planet's surface above. She could look up, and the gray, colorless sky only managed to wink at her in the form of a tectonic slit decorating the blackness above. It was like that for as far as the eye could see west and east, at least, until the trench curled or swung serpentinely and cut off its further reaches from view.

The air was stale, and the temperature was dropping. Kel snorted and looked up at the only sliver of the planet's heavens she could see.

_Night is falling._

Her knees ached and with a tired huff, she shifted off of her kneel and formed to a squat. Her feathers quivered to their quills and her shoulders wiggled beneath the duress of a shiver.

She _hated_ nighttime here. It was too damned cold for her taste.

_It's just until the plasma tanks are full._

-She hadn't said that to herself mentally, for it was a recollection. She was remembering what someone _else_ had told her not too long ago throughout these dragging periods of… what exactly did one call this?

Boredom? Uneventfulness?

_Utter blackness,_ Kel decided, leaning forwards to slip her gaze over the spine of her mechanical charge and the rocks she was squatted behind. The rim of the natural plateau dropped off right under her snout. It was nothing but a rolling fall from that point on. Just dark. It was all black. Nothing, nothing… _nothing…_

Kel's taloned fingers twitched around the hilt and handle of the weapon in her claws. She purposefully removed one of her palms and slipped it down the vibrant mane of black, white-skimmed feathers that sprawled like a tumbling mountain range down her back and neck. They still shivered and bristled, fluffing themselves.

Her world was very much about that. This self-sensitivity she usually had. She didn't like it and so she was prone to judgmental opinions of those around her instead of herself.

_Take this one for instance,_ her amber eyes were centered with thin daggers of black ink for irises. These narrowed when her unnaturally keen sense of perception locked onto something on the other end of the trench. _I know that hide._

Kel cooed with interest, and the crimson, bubble-like broach of her throat quivered with a slight purr. The T'vaoan winked an eye shut and brought up the rifle in her claws. She thumbed the safety rune on its display off and lined the scope's screen with her sight.

The Needlerifle granted her an ability of omnipresence. Just in a second, it took her closely to a tunnel mouth eating through the cliff face across the black gap, nearly a mile away from her.

It was the entrance to Gingerback, the largest of the three antechambers they were mining for the mineral waters inside, to convert the molecules charging the liquid into refined plasma strains for harvesting. Her scope at first made her heart leap, for what it showed her… did not belong.

At least, this was true if she was taking into account the vast majority of genetics that were present here.

_Can I shoot it? _–She immediately wondered, but then sighed in disappointment when the scope filled with a green-padded, squat and lumbering little thing that she knew all too well.

_Of course I can't,_ she snorted, her skull-fashioned facial features laxing with disinterest. _Engineer Yamva would throw a fit._

Kel smirked her exposed fangs as she lifted the scope from the waddling Unggoy assistant, and perched it right over engineer Yamva's head. The Kig-yar looked… _dubious,_ almost like he was really distracted as he walked beside his stout companion. His yellow eyes were darting around, bird-like; but then again, it was something very natural for him, that paranoia.

Kel liked to think of herself as calm, and collected, and a creature of those traits. Yamva was a nervous raven in comparison, always flicking his tongue, chattering his teeth and looking about the place, like someone was about to kill him for the corpses he desperately wanted to pick at.

_Space-chicken._

The T'vaoan giggled through her beak. Again, she was remembering the words of someone else. Though, the racial slur could've been used directly at her, she had recently discovered a passion for slinging mud at everyone else around her when she knew they couldn't hear her.

Her own kind, even other genetic offshoots, were not excluded.

To her, Yamva was what he was.

He was a fucking space-chicken. A vulture. A bone-picking scavenger.

If someone had a problem with that, than they could kiss her back-end feathers.

-Of course, though, as she watched the two workers trudge from the depths of the natural cavern, and walk onto an open-faced plateau jutting seamlessly from the cliff face wall, she had to remember that all of this high-end toxicity in her mood was brewed specifically for Yamva and not just everyone.

She never had liked him. She hadn't liked him the moment she had met him. During the fall-back procedures, when her and the rest of Kuhaga's company were consolidating the digsite, and setting up the landing platform for Tollen's boys, Yamva had been in charge of setting up the work-light systems and the circuit arrays.

Plasma generators deep in Spine Cave powered the entire site. Yamva had been a prude _and_ a bully in his efforts to organize the mechanics. He was the lead engineer, because, truthfully, Kuhaga had hired him due to the fact that he lacked anything like him beforehand.

No one else in the company had a grasp on Covenant-era tech like Yamva did.

-But, then again, that changed little for her.

Smart or not, quick with a wrench and welder-pistol or not, Yamva was still a raging, awful and conceded cunt to her.

She didn't like Taptap either. The little bastard squeaked and barked like a dog all day, and sometimes, she'd worried about him gripping someone's leg in an effort to make love to it. But she was much more tempted to shoot _Yamva_ instead of him. His head in her scope's center was deliciously tempting.

Her talon twitched on the rifle's trigger.

"…_Pckeeww~…_" –She mimicked the blast of a weapon under her own breath, jolting the barrel of her rifle slightly upwards to simulate a back-kick. Yamva was obviously unaffected. There he was, still lurking around in her sights.

_Eat it, space-chicken._

Kel sighed and lowered her gun, her backward-jointed legs adjusting in her sniper nest. The T'vaoan crooned quietly as she watched the two engineers leave the cave. Just barely, over the silent din of the trench, she could make out Taptap's faint squeaks and chirps echoing distantly. She sighed for a second time, elbowed the boulders in front of her, and laid her snout in her palm.

_Credits almost aren't worth this._

She ran her long, thin tongue over her teeth and smacked her chops. For a moment, craning her gaze up at the trench's fallible sky, she wondered about the insults she was using.

She'd only seen holographic pict-captures of _chickens_ before. She knew they were a bird that humans cultivated, or, at least, _used_ to cultivate. Somewhere in the galaxy had they done that… maybe… somewhere in their home system… Mars?

Were chickens native to Mars?

"Yo."

Kel didn't even glance when some gravel crunched, and footsteps emanated from directly behind her. Someone had walked up onto the plateau of her sniper nest.

"_Yo._" –The T'vaoan awkwardly returned with disinterest, still craning her eyes up at the impossibly high top of the massive trench surrounding her. The alien word sounded strange coming through her raptornoid teeth. But then again, the English language was strange enough, as was Chinese, though, she only knew some words in the latter and couldn't speak it formally.

"Nothing's happening?"

Kel dismissively arched an eye to her flank when the other person grunted and laid on their belly beside her, mimicking her lowness to the earth.

"You look dreadful." He told her.

She crooned at him and sunk her snout deeper into her palm. Her mind was still running circles. Those _chickens…_

"Is that Yamva and Taptap?" He asked a second later, and the air crackled- literally –as he played with something wrapped in foil.

"What do you know of chickens?" She asked suddenly, tapping her talons on the spine of her Needlerifle. Over the trench gap, Taptap was flinching as Yamva snapped something loud enough at him that the faint after-thought of the bark was heard from where they were.

_If he kicks the Grunt over the edge, I can use that as an excuse of him going rogue,_ Kel thought with hunger. _'He attacked site-personnel, and so, I was forced to engage and take him out'-_

_What a beautiful scenario… kill two birds with one stone. Well, a bird and a precipitously egregious swamp-midget._

"Are you serious?" The man beside her chuckled.

_Kill a _chicken_ with one stone. Cluck-cluck…_

"I brought you another bar." He told her when she didn't look at him. Kel's nostrils flared. She smelled it right as he told her. "So, why exactly do you want to know about-"

"_Gimme'._" The T'vaoan croaked in her straw-like voice. One minute, a black-gloved hand had been enwrapped around the length of a long chocolate bar. The next, and Kel had snatched it from him, turned around, and bitten into it.

Seconds later, the silence was permeated with wet, tiny sloshing sounds as she chewed noisily.

Talner Tolworth chuckled again and sat up on his knees, smiling at her.

"I'll never get why you people like chocolate so much." The human grinned in wonder, observing the Kig-yar's snout, balled at the cheeks from how much of the large bar she'd shoved in her maw at once. "I'd tell ya' to take human-bites, but, uh…"

"_Chickens._" Kel muffled, peeling the rest of the paper off the bar, before opening her mouth- and making him grimace at the brown slicks of sludgy remnants still clinging to her teeth –before popping the rest of the bar in and chewing again. "_Tell me about chickens, Talner._"

"…Earth-bird, two feet, two wings," Talner grew mischevious, he reached over and stuck his hand into the feathers splaying down the back of her neck. "-they got _these_ too."

Kel gave off a tiny- '_Wrawt~!' –_like sound and pushed him farther away from her with one of her taloned feet in his chest. She unceremoniously discarded the candy-bar wrapper over her shoulder, and listened as the wind took it away to fall into the bottomless blackness below and over the boulder barricade behind her.

"What else?" She swallowed, and nursed her rifle in her lap, scrutinizing him expressionlessly with her two, lizard-like eyes.

"Chickens are farm animals." He shrugged, running a hand through his brown, clean-cut hair. It was almost stubble, on top of his scalp. She looked at it and felt her feathers bristle. It was such a contrast, the things that grew out of both their scalps. Though, she would always try to shield her prolonged observations of Talner's youthful features with some uninteresting excuse, she knew deeply inside that she did so for reasons all her own.

"People eat them, use their eggs, keep 'em as pets… And they come from Earth." The man finished explaining with a slight smirk.

"Not Mars? They are not native to Mars?" She blinked.

"_No,_ why the hell would they come from-" Talner laughed at her, and she shrugged. "_Earth. _They come from Earth. Though, I guess people on Mars have 'em now too. They got everything else they got on Earth on Mars these days."

"Have you ever been to Mars?" Kel-Yn-Gor settled on her rump and asked him. She always sounded like she was croaking when she asked him questions. She never asked anyone else in the company questions.

"_Naw'._" Talner waved a hand at her, digging into some of the pouches hanging off his belt, until he came out with another candy-bar. "Sol System was never on my bucket list. But I went to Alpha Centauri. I dunno' if that counts for ya', honey."

"Tell me about Alpha Cent-Tor-Eee." –She mispronounced in broken English. Talner, her…- _acquaintance? _Maybe? Whatever he was to her –laughed.

"Not a lot there. Mostly space-habitats, asteroid colonies and trade outposts." Talner shrugged, picking the wrapper off the bar. He sat in the dirt and noticed with a grin as she fixated on the chocolate in his fingers. Her tongue swiveled over her visible fangs. Sometimes, her face resembled the visage of a skull to him. "So, anything new?"

"Nights here are too cold." Kel said, doting on the spine of her gun. "Kuhaga has said nothing to you or me."

"Kuhaga says nothing to anyone." Talner shook his head, munching on the top of the bar. He hadn't even managed a second bite when Kel looked back up and centered her gaze on it squarely.

Talner swallowed, blinked, took one last bite and handed her the rest. The T'vaoan crooned at him with delight and snatched it from his hand. Another wrapper was lost on the wind over her feathered head a second later.

"I told you, we just have to get the last of the plasma to fill the tanks, and we're outta' here."

"That will take a long time." Kel swallowed the last of the bar and smacked her chops. The red, globular organ capping her throat always flexed strangely whenever she swallowed. Talner watched it with an innate fascination. "The burn tanks keep breaking. Yamva always has such work cut out for him." She snickered venomously.

"He bothers you that much, eh?" Talner chuckled.

"I _hate_ Yamva." She squawked, rolling her boney mandible, doting on her sniper rifle. "He is not worth the expenditure of air or currency. _Dead-fingered,_ I say. He puts his claws in every nook they do not belong in and he revels in that."

"You called him something once," Talner folded his arms over his padded cuirass, smirking. "-something real nasty. I almost pissed myself when you-"

"Yamva is a raging, awful, conceded cunt."

Talner snorted so loudly that his throat hurt.

He doubled over and started laughing. His seeing the Kig-yar so casually make the remark was too much.

Kel- in response –blinked and shrugged, her feathers ruffling at the sight of her incapacitated human friend.

"_What? _What did I say?" She croaked.

* * *

{👾}


	2. Chapter 2

**Featherkisser**

**2**

* * *

Talner and Kel's jobs down here were all about _shifts._ Everything came and went, and everything was determined by who was next on the chopping block, so-to-speak.

Schedules for most people were frail things, and they were easy to screw up. The nights here took something already made of glass and threatened it with stone. Even without Kuhaga's badgering, neither of them had any desire to usurp their own responsibilities.

Besides, there were much worse things lurking in the dark beside all these rock hobbles and cliff faces.

"Kuhaga never told us a name for them."

Talner took his eyes out from his binoculars and looked over oddly at the T'vaoan. Her skull-like face was set, like concrete, and if he hadn't caught her teeth surely flexing in the corner of his vision, he wouldn't have had any clue that she had spoken.

"I reckon he didn't." Talner shrugged, shifting on his belly so he could crane over and examine the side of her avian snout. "But then, nothing else in this moss-hole has a name either. _Tg-66?_ The Alliance couldn't even bother with something better than a _code._"

"They did not land here." Kel's eye on his side was the open one, and normally it was narrowed, and pushed straight ahead to gaze into her Needlerifle's scope. But after she stated this, Talner found himself looking directly into it for a heart-stopping second. His blood chilled.

"…I heard they sent a few drones, but…" –His small-talk might or might not have worked. Right now he was fumbling, and he only ever fumbled when he was _caught._

Caught as he might have been, he soon remembered that there was a certain degree of permission here.

He had passed theoretical gates, and there were things that she gave him leniency with that she did not give anyone else in the company.

_Just some things, I'd say, _he thought in a clarifying lapse.

"My pack is too tight."

"_Wha'…?_" Talner blinked rapidly, like someone had thrown a pinch of salt in his face. "What did ya' say?"

"My pack." Kel still had her one eye craned to him. She moved her avian body in a slight mimicry of motion, most likely in admiration to a caterpillar's angle. She wriggled her back, and the padded cuirass securing her blackly colored flesh from him shifted across her outline. "It's too tight."

For a second, Talner glanced between her back, and her yellow eye dumbly. Then, he laughed, put down the binoculars, and sat himself up off his elbows.

"It's cuzz' you're looping the belt straps." He told her quickly, feeling a chilled spike shoot down his forehead at the closeness of his own calling. He leaned over her, and didn't hesitate to wrap his arms underneath her slender torso. Kel kept her gaze locked in her rifle's scope, though, he did notice her occasionally peeking back at him past the crest of her feathered mane. "Don't loop the belt straps, and the mag-locks will keep on ya' enough. You're too skinny for all that extra tetherin'-"

Talner paused, dared himself, and added a sweetly toned- '-_honey' _–at the end of his explanatory jest.

Kel made a tiny crooning noise in response but didn't do much else. She just kept passively peering at him. Her eye was an amber flicker over the rim of a star of black. What with all the feathers, the rear of her bird-like scalp, and her back neck bloomed like a bouquet of dusty midnight flowers.

Her feathers were pillowy and soft to the touch. They were strange things to him, but things altogether that never escaped his notice. He had never possessed any good company to discuss it with, and perhaps he did find his own actions distasteful in that they were indirect.

_God,_ Talner tried to focus on the interior of his own skull, rolling his eyes back as he struggled with the straps pinned under her chest. Luckily, they were placed more between the rib's joint and the abdomen. If it had been a little higher, his nerves might have checked him to stillness. That didn't make it _not_ a struggle for him, though.

_Keep coverin' it with small talk._

"See anything out there?" He saw her looking at him past her mane still, and nodded for the gun in her hands. The Kig-yar, for her part, seemed a little flustered at his perception, like she was annoyed with herself that he had seen her peaking.

What she did not tell him was the _reason_ that she was looking at him for. It wasn't simply the contact, but it was from picking up his _scent._

Kig-yar possessed doubly the senses of humans. One of her kind could simply pick out the smells and smaller sights in an environment much quicker.

Henceforth, a smell powerful to the human nose was twenty times as powerful to hers. Talner smelt of flesh-salt, plastics from his attire and was drenched in a tinge of cologne-stench. Her heart was literally dancing loops in her throat.

Her feathery mane bristled, and he saw her shake her head, offering the quiet night air a tiny craw beneath her breath as she regained composure.

"Negative." She reported briskly, turning the rifle's bearing to the west, aiming the slender barrel over the top crags of the boulders ringing the plateau of their sniper nest. "Ginger, check, Alpha, check, Spine, check. All is dark here."

He loosened the straps on her combat harness, and immediately swept away from the heat-filled presence of her form, rolling off her and back onto the dirt.

"All fixed, love." He snickered.

_God,_ he mentally gawked, suddenly wishing he could've shoved his whole fist into his mouth.

The T'vaoan didn't say thank you. She merely cooed and twitched the feathers running down her back. She wasn't looking at him, and so, he grunted, flattening his chest to the earth, and dutifully made to retrieve his binoculars.

"What of you?" She suddenly asked him.

"What about me?" He grinned.

"Did you _see_ anything?" She nodded at the binoculars, but was now looking right at him. She looked like an eagle. An upright, alerted, space-eagle. Her long snout was flattened from the perspective he was looking at it from. Black, with white highlights, dusty coating and the fashion of bone. The markings on her face looked like warpaint.

_I'm seeing a lot now, forget before-_

"Nothin'." He winked.

Kel's head arched back a little, and a tiny- '_Mmraw…~_' –mediated in the back of her throat. She stuck the scope back over her eye and jabbed the rifle over the boulders, eagerly looking for something to shoot.

-Or perhaps, she eagerly sought something else to look at besides him.

"Do you have any more of the bars?" She asked him.

"Fresh out." He grunted, pressing the binoculars over his brow. He checked the flickering feed they gave him, taking them up and down, left and right over the edge of the very blackness of the trench below.

So far, there was nothing.

He heard Kel sigh in disappointment. Whether it was because of the chocolate running out, the lack of targets, or her own impatience with him, he didn't know.

"Tell me of the burn tanks." Kel shifted on her belly. "Why do they keep breaking?"

"…They're, _uhm-_" He cleared his throat. "-they're being overloaded. Overloaded to high hell. Kuhaga won't replace the cores, and that's why ole' Yamva's running a cross country circuit between Ginger and Spine. He keeps havin' to fix the damn things because too much ore is coming through at once."

"What is that?"

"What's what?"

"A- '_Cross Country Circuit?' –_" She pronounced slowly.

"…Aw, old Earth expression."

"Tell me of it." She croaked.

Talner lowered the binocs' and coughed.

_God damn it, what is wrong with her tonight?_

He looked up at the top of the trench. He could no longer discern the sky from the cliff faces. Everything up there was just black. Night had eaten everything.

The digsite ahead and below them sprawled in a consistent blue light from the hundreds of staked worklamps studded and sprinkled throughout the causeways and ledges. The digsite was a buffer, and the dusk evening swelled around it, like it hoped to stamp out its beacon of illumination.

_Too dark. Too cold._

He looked over at Kel and found her staring at him in the evening shade. She looked like a creature of the night, vaguely draconic, lithe and not disturbed by any sort of thing that could've happened. Her eyes were felinoid in the darkness. Two disks of glowing bronze, centered with daggers of black. She had snake eyes.

"What is it?" He blinked. "_What?_"

"I assumed you were going to be speaking." She returned his blinking gesture, but hers was slow, and fossilized. Her lids seemed heavy, and her mood quaint.

Sometimes, he forgot just how _alien_ she really was. How many social cues had they passed each other and missed because of the different backgrounds?

Christ almighty, there was probably a pile.

"-Why're you always asking so many questions anyhow?" Talner grinned, doting on his binocs', feeling her return to the Needlerifle's scope. His binoculars looked blue in the worklamp haze of the area. Everything was blue. Blue _cast._ Blue, blue, blue… _blue._

Blue and yellow. Blue outside, yellow inside the mineral water caverns.

Fancy that shit, right?

"Do they offend you?" The Kig-yar quietly crooned by his flank. She sounded like she was pouting.

"What's botherin' you tonight, Kel?" He asked, staring through the blue haze at the flank of her alien body. "You're actin' funny."

"I asked first."

"_No,_ they don't offend me. But you're actin' funky." Talner put down the binocs' and grinned. "What is it that you always say? C'mon, Kel, _confide in me._"

Kel snorted and gave off a tiny noise of fascination. Out of all the things she'd expected from Talner, him reversing words on her wasn't one of them.

The T'vaoan took a long moment to look at him in the darkness of the digsite's lamp-hazed night. She scrutinized him with her amber, felinoid eyes and felt her feathers rustle. This earned a muttering croon on her own end, and she bashfully stuck her face back into the scope of her rifle.

She realized- with a sour taste in her mouth –that his concern was flattering to her.

"Target mark." Kel croaked, shoving the rifle's spine so eagerly into her shoulder that it started to hurt. "Firing."

"-_Waitasec'- just what are we doin' now-?_"

**_Crack~! _**–the night flashed in a resounding flower of pinkish color. It was just for a second, permeated and marked by the glassy snap of synthetic crystal.

No sooner had Talner's features been painted magenta by the burst of hue did he snap the binoculars to his face. He didn't catch the impact, but he did catch the results.

The shot had traveled horizontally over the mile-wide gap of the trench. The Needler shard's victim was a black, amorphous and vaguely arachnid sprawl that had been clinging to the cliffside wall far below the various walkways and bridges they used to scale the area.

It fell soundlessly back into the shadows from whence it had been born. Talner was quick with his own scope, and probably due to that talent was he able to trace the thing's flight for a split second.

He could barely make out the limp extensions of bladed limbs wiggling from a center dais of plated chitin. The creature's corpse trailed sickly colored ichor as a globular trail in its wake. This spilled life tumbled into the darkness after it, chasing its warm host with eerie vigor.

In a split second, it was all was over. Beside him, Talner heard Kel croon. This time, it was a vocal demonstration of audible relief, being akin to the sound someone would make after putting down a strenuous load they had been carrying for some distance.

He smirked- whether at the irony or amusement, he didn't know –and put down the binocs' to grin at his avian friend.

Kel's eyes looked as warm as they were colored, and a little smile was winding up her beak-like snout.

"You needed that." Talner chuckled.

"_Hell yes~._" She croaked under her breath. The Kig-yar wore an expression of resplendence, lowered her rifle and checked the uplink on her wrist, scowling suddenly at the current cycle listed.

"'Bout high time anyhow." Talner reached over and straightened some of her feathers with a few zealous pinches and pulls. "Shift change, darling."

"Yes." Kel huffed from the pleasurable shivers she received from his touch, and made to lift herself off her own belly. The war-padding over her shoulder glinted in the dark, catching blue from the lamp-spires nearby their little plateau. "It was an uneventful sortie."

"You can say that again." Talner stuffed the binocs' on his belt. "But, hey, more activity then there's been."

"Kuhaga does not listen to me." Kel craned an arm over her flank, and waited for the mag-locks on her rifle to adhere to the rear of her cuirass with an audible _click~! _–of noise. "How do you say it?"

"I'll _grill_ him." Talner said, smirking when Kel bobbed her chin, remembering the word that had been tickling the tip of her thin tongue. "See ya' tomorrow."

Kel hesitated as the two of them stood in the sniper nest. He saw her claw twitch by her hip, and her feathers become disheveled. The shorter alien looked away from him and huffed.

Instinctually, Talner reached around her arm to fix her mane, but Kel separated herself with an impatient croon and trotted towards the natural ramp to their south.

"Night." –She sharply chipped, and her darkly colored form was swallowed by dusk's embrace.

* * *

{👾}

Yamva suddenly realized that he was gripped by a need to smash Kuhaga in the face with one of his wrenches.

There were a myriad of reasons for _why_ he felt that way, but two stood out in definite obviousness. Firstly, Kuhaga was still being stubborn. He was _so_ stubborn that the things he was saying were mechanically nonsensible. The inner engineer of Yamva's soul was shrieking.

Secondly, Kuhaga normally possessed an ugly face, but right now, as he was scowling at his subordinate, the ringleader was gripped by a particular expression that simply rendered his physique _teeth-grating._

Yamva ground his fangs, and felt the tan-colored flesh lining his chops tug in a slight twitch.

_Maybe if I flexed my fingers,_ one of the Kig-yar's amber eyes darted down to his flank, where a certain hunchbacked calamity was currently teetering in uncomfortable silence by his heels. _The gas-sucker would get the message and hand me one of the bolt-fixers. A nice big one. An eight-eighteen. Heavy wrenches, those ones. Kuhaga's skull would pop open like a ripe fruit._

"You are completely right," Yamva grinned like a crocodile, for his other eye reinserted the ever-present knowledge that he was alone here, with but a few fetid sweeps. Kuhaga had a sidearm, but at least it wasn't in his hand.

Kuhaga's two _guards, _however, both had projectile carbines in their clasps. The guns were dull, black rectangles in the din of Spine Cavern, but their ammunition readouts glowered at him like a pair of sickly, neon-green stars in the dark.

"-the burn-tanks are functioning, and plasma will begin to flow again." Yamva even concluded his statement with a slight _bow._ It made his spine ache and his guts swirl.

_Ugly, simian, unkempt son of a bitch._

"If I may speak out of term once more; _if_ we do not replace the tanks' filtration vents, I may not be able to get them working the next time they overheat." He knew that Kuhaga had made to interject, and so Yamva spoke rapidly, as best he could with human-speak. Though, by now the Kig-yar engineer had become so used to alien tongues that his own had become more a far-flung, exotic backwash in the very rear of his throat.

By the gods, he couldn't even remember the last time he'd used his home dialect with even one of his own kind.

All the other Kig-yar here were _homeworlders_ and asteroid-goers. He was the only one from his own rock, and that had made barriers in their tongues evident.

It was funny, because Yamva _hated_ speaking English. It made his mouth feel like the interior of a flushing latrine bowl. The language was dirty, lacking in grace, and it twisted his fangs in every direction they were never meant to go.

_Translators would have been nice._

"You won't have to worry about that." Kuhaga said.

Yamva released himself from his bow, and glared at Kuhaga over the short distance dividing them. The darkly skinned, bald giant of a human man shook his head at the concerns with disinterest, making Yamva's heart sink.

"The stowage is almost full. Once we have a complete load, we're kicking off planetside and heading west right after." Kuhaga had a gravelly voice, making it sound as if his throat was populated not by flesh and chords, but by jagged rocks. "There are ports, Dry Dock and Refuse being the name two. Confederates aren't going to argue against a fresh supply."

Yamva opened his beak and left it hanging. He glared once at Taptap beside him just for the hell of it, and contemplated his next words carefully.

"…Aren't our contracts _finite_ to the end of this job?"

"You got that right." Kuhaga frowned. The two guards at his flanks looked so bored, that Yamva was afraid one of them would shoot his Grunt just to liven the conversation up.

For how much hate-talk the engineer gave the little gas-sucking shit, he certainly had a long neck to put out for him.

Thusly, in a righteous display of immaculate insanity, Yamva took a step forward and actually placed a leg in front of Taptap to divide the two parties. Yamva realized his own reactive prominence and coughed.

It wasn't a human cough either. It was something like a reptilian wheeze. He'd just done that to relieve the urge to curse out loud.

_Crack open his head with one of the wrenches! Even if the underlings pepper you to pieces with DMR rounds, it would have all been worth it!_

Kuhaga's bald scalp gleamed like a fresh target in the Spine cave's din. Yamva licked his teeth.

"Is there a problem?" Kuhaga asked.

"There're over thirty-six contracts, most of them from the Eayn prefecture's range and Dust Rim. You're going to leave them all with the _Confederates?_" Yamva spoke. "Dry Dock and Refuse are havens, yes, but they're _holes,_ Kuhaga. Where are you going to get new blood when all the old blood hasn't forgiven you for dumping them off in the galaxy's proverbial arm-pit?"

"That isn't for you to worry about." Kuhaga snorted. "Besides, we could always fly just a few parsecs north and end up in _Winsway,_ not an arm-pit, but an _asshole_."

_Wrench. Wrench!_

Yamva bowed again.

"As long as the credits flow." He said.

"However it'll turn out once the stowage is done, we'll see." Kuhaga let some of the tension bleed from himself. The large human folded his arms behind his back and stared. "You aren't the only veteran in these ranks, Yamva, and we might need you after this."

When Yamva said nothing, Kuhaga ascertained for the unspoken concern.

"Under _pay,_ of course." He growled.

Sensing a rift, Kuhaga spat on the floor and briskly spun around on a heel. He and his entourage were gone as quickly as they had appeared, and Yamva watched their armored backs with a simmering need for violence.

"But, Yamva, you say that burn tanks not-"

Taptap's complaint was silenced beneath a pained yelp. Yamva had lifted a foot and stamped on the Unggoy's little hoof so hard that the joints cracked.

"Not within _earshot._" The Kig-yar chattered, sweeping an arm- making Taptap flinch away –and gesturing for him to follow. "Come on."

"If burn tanks break, plasma cause holdup." Taptap made sure to keep his voice down, watching with beady red eyes as Kuhaga's troupe vanished around the tunnel's corner. "If there holdup, all here _longer._"

"I know." Yamva dragged a claw down his snout. _Little idiot. _"-That only increases the risk. Tg-66 is in unfriendly space, and the longer we persist here, the more of a chance we'll be discovered."

Yamva looked down at Taptap as they walked.

"I know you don't understand half the weight of what we're currently stuck in, but I can tell you that anything passing for authority this far from Alliance space, will have its own brand of personal justice."

"…_Uhm…_" The Unggoy paused as he waddled.

_Too fast again._

"Just stay close and keep some spare tanks available for yourself." Yamva said. "Do you still have the welder-pistols on you?"

"What those?"

Yamva rolled a jaw.

"The... what did you call them? The _shiny burning guns?_"

Taptap went very quiet, but then caused Yamva to grit his fangs with a shrill outburst.

"_Yeah! _Shiny burning guns! We got two." Taptap reported pridefully, even holding up the aforementioned number of claw-like digits for emphasis. Unfortunately, the fingers participating numbered _four_. "We need fix something?"

"In a sense." Yamva chortled like a chattering crow. "Bring those with the toolbox in a few cycles, when day breaks. They'll get suspicious if they see me carrying them."

"What that word mean?"

"What word?"

"_Sussy-pickious._"

Yamva cursed in his native language, laughing. Sometimes, the Unggoy's stupidity was like a short-fuze bomb. Taptap would flap his gums, and Yamva's nerves would just make him-

**_Clack~!_**

"-_Aye~! _Read my teeth; watch where you travel, or I swear I shall-" Yamva's threats were sucked right out of his beak when he saw who he had bumped into.

"I'd be wiser to whom I issue threats." Kel-Yn-Gor's voice was like a scythe through wheat. Yamva's effort must have been tired as such for her to so easily smite it.

The Kig-yar engineer stepped back from where he'd collided with her and crossly glared over his own beak.

Kel, for her own part, hadn't moved a muscle. Running into her had been like walking head-on into a stone wall.

Initially stupefied by the suddenness of it, Taptap regained his senses, earning an unconcerned glance from Kel as he gathered by Yamva's foot and growled. The noise sounded like that of an angry little dog. It made Kel smile, and Yamva cringe.

"Engineer." The T'vaoan angled her jaw in a disgruntled greeting, even going so far as to dust off her breastplate. "Off-duty?"

"Kel-Yn-Gor, what a pleasure. _Yes,_ I am." Yamva cocked his bird-like head, scrutinizing, more for his own personal inhibitions than for any sense of real threat-analytics. To him, Kel was a loose, but controllable predator. She only struck when provoked. "Yourself?"

"Yes."

"An uneventful cycle?"

"No."

"_No?_"

"No." Kel smirked a little bit. Yamva found the expression alien to her normally grim muzzle. "One kill tonight. After that, all was well and dark."

"What a normalcy…" Yamva actually produced a slight whistle as Kel started to walk around him. His words died in his throat, and their corpses whisked past his fangs.

Kel kept a distance as she nonchalantly murdered the exchange, though she was vainly- as always –maintaining a degree of dismissive annoyance when she noticed Yamva staring at her hips. He _always_ stared at her hips.

"Never like her anyway…" Taptap grumbled by his foot. Yamva snorted and shoved roughly past the Grunt's tank-hump, following after the sniper. Taptap chattered excitedly and fell flat on his face in a slight puff of dust. Nearby, a pair of passing human sentries chuckled from a tunnel over.

"Kel-Yn-Gor, there's something of late that I think would intrigue you." Yamva stated openly, and honestly, following on her heels closely, enough for the T'vaoan's feathers to bristle uncomfortably. "-I've heard some things."

"Get away from me, _Yamva._" Kel's skull-like chops blared in a disparate grimace. She had said his name like it was a plague!

_That bitch._

"I'm not presuming to hold a conversation with you." Yamva smiled pleasantly, or, as pleasantly as his serrated dagger-teeth would allow him. He looked like a crocodile again, but with all the slipperiness of a snake. "This plasma could be the death of us all, you know."

"Whatever it is you have scraped off the floors here does not interest me." Kel rolled her felinoid eyes. Her claw twitched as she considered how long it would take her to leap away from him and arm herself with her Needlerifle if the situation warranted it.

"Our first meeting went off on a tangent, Kel-Yn-Gor."

-Whenever he spoke her name, it made her skin crawl. Kel was graced with an overpowering urge to shoot and kill him.

"I talked with Kuhaga." Yamva stated quickly. "Do you know where he intends to end the contracts? Do you?"

"Why would I believe anything that slipped from your teeth?" Kel hissed.

"Because I want to warn you."

Kel hunched menacingly, spun around and kept her teeth bare, snarling at the engineer, and enacting a quaint few steps back on his part.

"Do you think I am stupid?" Kel asked him, pointing at the tunnels surrounding them. "Do you think I don't know what Kuhaga is doing?"

"It is not like _that._" Yamva held his claws up for peace. Behind him, Taptap was spitting soil from the rinds on his mask and was wiggling to his cloven feet. The ruckus was palpable and wholly annoying. "Kuhaga fancies Confederates. _Human_ Confederates. That far outside of Alliance or Neo space is too fiery for my taste. I'm proposing you."

"You're _what?_" Kel was reaching around for her gun.

"-_For a truce!_" Yamva stepped forwards, but quickly stilled himself. His possessive attitude made her blood run cold, and now, the urge to defend herself was overwhelming.

But, then again, Yamva's mere presence was enough to elicit that response from anyone, especially a member of his own race that possessed the opposite gender.

"My _assistant,_" Yamva gestured to the struggling Unggoy behind him. Taptap was rolling around like a beetle flipped onto its back.

"Yamva~!" Taptap cried weakly, teetering on his own tank. "-_Help~!_"

"-….My… _assistant,_" Yamva spat quietly. "has a way for us to get out of this with all the right pieces, so to speak."

Kel lowered her claw from her own shoulder and crooned quietly. Though she did not drop the defensive pact between her heels, she did allow her guard to somewhat wither.

"If I told Kuhaga about your plans for mutiny," She elaborated. "he would be more inclined to believe me over _you._ Word against word, Yamva, and I will succeed where you cannot."

"I _know._" The engineer sneered. "That's why you're the first Kig-yar I must convince. Blood to blood."

"I am the first you must convince because you are a _freak._" Kel shook her head. "I want no part of whatever it is you're planning."

"Even if it guarantees survival?"

"Survival? With only that Balaho-trudger and _you_ as company?" Kel laughed, backing away down the tunnel. "Especially if it guarantees _that._"

"You're making a mistake." Yamva croaked.

"We all do at some point." The T'vaoan rounded a corner and vanished.

"_-Yamva-!_" Taptap whined behind him, his clawed feet kicking in the air. He couldn't get up. "-_Yamva~!_"

Yamva stared at the corner of the tunnel, then turned around and roared: "-_I know~!_"

* * *

{👾}

Tg-66 had crabs. Really big, ugly crabs, that crawled out from the blackness of the trench below the digsite.

Ever since Kuhaga had led them all here to start harvesting the plasma had the little buggers started cropping up. They were man-sized beasties. Arachnid in construction, possessed of a pair of razor-sharp claws and bulky legs. The Cliff Crabs were numerous, tough, and they had a taste for fresh flesh.

One of the contractors had already met his end at their claws. Talner remembered it vividly. The body, sliced to ribbons, gnawed on by tens of serrated little mouth-pieces. He'd originally felt bad for the crabs when he had first started shooting them.

After that, killing them had felt endearing, like he was doing this backwater rock a favor.

The problem was, that they just didn't stop coming.

That was where he and Kel came in.

Nightly posts were a thing here, and basically, his job revolved around pest control these days. Kel always had her trusty Needlerifle, and Talner bridged up with his decommissioned sniper carbine.

The heavy-duty gun was a prelude to what he would ultimately forge his career into, and was a symbol of the man he had once been. Everyday he held it and operated it, it in return fed his soul bittersweet feelings of near euphoric memory.

During his years in the corps it had served him well. But now, his girl was an antique. Ever since he had been discharged from the ranks, had the model kept changing and evolving.

The new rifles orbiting around in the UNSC made his look like a children's toy. But to Talner, that was unimportant. What mattered was getting the job done.

**_Bang~! _**–the sniper rifle kicked and the brass howled in his ears. The coppery shell bounced off his shoulder, and through the scope, he could see the fat, ugly Land Crab that had been crawling up the trench face split in half, right down the middle.

The armor-piercing bullets rendered the creatures' tough carapaces as effective as napkin paper. Shooting them was like shooting water balloons. The rounds punched and split everything open like a ripe melon. He was surprised they hadn't given up, what with several of their adventurous friends raining back down to the pits below in mushy pieces.

Talner slid a fresh magazine into the gun's fat underbelly and yanked the bolt back. He'd already killed eight of the things, and it hadn't even been an hour.

Perhaps he was just lucky, or Kel was very _unlucky_. Either way, she would be crooning with interest tomorrow when he reported his kills.

_That's a darn shame,_ he smiled sadly, sweeping the cliff face with his scope. _What it's all come to._

Back in the corps, his watches wouldn't be so static and permanent, and they certainly wouldn't have been over something so fickle such as Land Crabs on Tg-66.

His career in the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers had nailed in a certain degree of hardiness into his routine. The scope had always fed him sigils of death and torment and brutality. Seeing the crabs split open like that was no different than watching a Brute's face implode or a Grunt's belly cave-in.

How many had that allotted to? He didn't know. Talner wasn't bothered by the killing, and he knew that was because of the species difference.

As he adjusted the weapon's sight, he realized that the thing that _was_ bothering him was _Kel._

Kel-Yn-Gor, the other sharpshooter on duty for Kuhaga's contractors.

She was a confusing tidbit of energy in his brain.

Ever since he had been discharged, this is where he had ended up. Mercenary work was his calling, in a sense, though he would've described it that way purely to avoid outright stating that he didn't know how to live without a gun in his hands anymore.

He was about to have his thirtieth birthday soon, and that realization nagged him as much as Kel's visage did. The T'vaoan was his only conversation out here, and to think for a moment that he risked that with his damned PTSD made him angry.

_I wonder if that's what's giving her hell._

He zoomed the scope westward and pulled the trigger.

**_Bang~!_**

-A Land Crab bigger than his torso popped like a sack full of jelly. The limbs and chunks rolled and bounced back into the blackness of the trench.

The gun jammed, and he yanked the casing free with a quick tug of the bolt.

_I should've brought more chocolate._

Kel loved that stuff. Something about her had always revolved around it. As in, his knowledge on her _disturbed him._

He knew that Kel was a chocolate fiend. He knew that she was a lifetime merc', and that her combat experience had come from being a gunrunner out in the Eayn asteroid fields for almost _eight years_ before she had met him.

He knew that she enjoyed having her feathers touched. He knew that she hated cold weather. He knew that Kel was enraptured in a kind of intrigue that any member of her species would recognize with infatuated interest.

Talner coughed and swept the scope east.

_Son of a bitch._

-Honestly, who was here to judge that about him? Who was here to preach the gospel, portray sin or question integrity?

It made perfect sense. Maybe he'd shot so many aliens that now their exposed anatomy had worn off on him.

Or maybe he was going crazy.

_Damned PTSD._

The moment that man, that bloody doctor, had told him of that on the excursion to Harvest… Talner had been angry with himself since then. He couldn't tell anyone why. But when the doctor had announced that diagnosis, it had simply _enraged_ him.

So, like a druggy hooked on the material, he had followed the fuse-line.

He was still out here, in space, shooting things. That doctor would've howled at the audacity.

Talner spit into the dust and pulled the trigger.

**_Bang~!_**

_-Ten in one night. Go me._

The shell danced past his cheek. He tried to blot out his mental chaos and focus on Kel again. He found himself wishing she was next to him, as she always was whenever he showed up early for the shift change. The dirt up on the plateau always felt… _lonely_ to him.

_Fuckin' hell._

**_Bang~!_**

**_Bang~!_**

-He ejected the magazine and switched it.

_I'll have to bring more chocolate tomorrow,_ he looked up at the sky for a second. It was too black to discern it from the cliffs, but he knew it was there. _Maybe I can _bribe_ an answer out of her._

* * *

{👾}

The cot wasn't much relief from an otherwise fang-chatteringly cold atmosphere. Still, it was better than the soil. Spine Cavern didn't offer much hospitality in any sense, but the secluded cell was at least something.

Truth be told, the caverns wound so deeply into the earth of Tg-66 that the contractors hadn't explored Spine's deepest extensions yet. There were still at least twenty documented miles of tunnels and passages that hadn't been swept, and armed details were kept at every known mouth to these 'Unknown Sectors' –for that very reason.

The Land Crabs were the biggest concern, but there was no telling what else was present in these tunnels. Some of the other men were talking about black shapes, deep in the crevices of Spine that were so fast, that they couldn't be tracked by the naked eye.

Kel thought it was all bullshit.

It was nothing more than extraneous tales told by exhausted night-duty patrols. There were only around forty people in the digsite, a mix between Kig-yar and human. Everyone here was running from something. That much paranoia in one place would undoubtedly lead to some… _interesting_ episodes of the night-creepies.

Kel, for her part, didn't fear the dark. She had always been forced to live in it for so long, that she supposed it was sort of a haven for her.

The cot may have been uncomfortable as all hell but its place in the shadows was perfect for her tastes. Its springs squeaked as the T'vaoan curled up her lithe form and nested in its sheets, much like how a bird would.

_Fucking space chicken._

Kel furrowed her eye-ridges and crooned in annoyance. Yamva's badgering had set her off on a bit of a tangent.

So, he was planning a mutiny.

Who the hell out here wasn't?

Kuhaga was a self-serving son of a bitch who only had interests placed in his own lap with the intent to suck the labor freely out of his fellows.

So far, every ex-UNSC goon Kel had encountered had proven to be nothing but yet another leech and a condescending thug. It was as if they had been trained to and sought to use that system to further expunge things for their own gain.

Talk about manufactured disenfranchisement.

_…Except Talner, of course._

The T'vaoan tried to close her eyes, but found one of them staying open at the ex-ODST's mentioning.

He was such a… a…

-What was the word again? It was human. _English._ Something with a…

_Doofus._

Kel produced a tiny clucking under her breath and stewed in the cot's sheets.

_Yes. What a doofus._

The body-sleeve over her form felt tight. Her feathers broached and she squirmed underneath the synthetic wrapping. A click of her tongue extenuated her own annoyance. Things always got like this whenever he popped into her head.

Kel was a loner by heart and had never sought to undo that. Being paid to fend off frigate-thieves in the asteroid belts around T'vao had solidified that reclusive nature into her, especially after she had killed her first man.

She had been a chick back then.

At least, practically.

But, chick or not, she needed to eat, and shooting people in the head had proven an easy way to make credits. Her kind were naturally predisposed to being marksmen, but Kel had always shown great promise.

Her talent for long-ranged killing was precise enough to force several employers into bidding wars, and throughout her anti-piracy years on T'vao, she had found herself switching sides frequently to follow the paychecks.

Things were always interesting when you were raiding the same frigate you had been paid to escort two weeks prior.

There was enough killing in Eayn to ensure an endless supply of opportunities.

So she wondered why after all that time, she was feeling sentimental _now. _She'd had plenty of opportunities to stew in her own shit and undo the past, but now, that she was out here, in the middle of Tg-66, _now_ she wanted the proverbial reset button.

To what end did _that_ make sense?

_Talner._

Kel huffed, her crimson throat warbling. She sat up in the cot and looked around her cell. The natural walls glistened with cave-dew, and the little lamp-pack placed by the archway portal to the hall outside glimmered blue in the dusk air.

Footsteps outside earned a natural reaction from her. The Kig-yar's claw brushed tenderly over the spine of her Needlerifle, which was placed presumptuously underneath the cot's flank.

Someone cleared their throat, and the footsteps became hollow, and eventually vanished. Kel chattered and curled back up in the sheets to pout. It had just been one of the sentries. There were always five or six on duty inside Spine every night. She was paranoid, she remembered.

_Talner._

Kel licked her fangs and slapped her chops. She suddenly had a craving for chocolate again. That stuff was the highlight of her times with him. She _loved_ chocolate.

Feeling her feathers tickle her, the Kig-yar arched an arm back and jammed her claws into them to stifle the irritation. Her hips ached and her thighs felt warm. She licked her whole muzzle this time, gave off a tiny- '_Crawwwwt~…._' –and rubbed the dagger of her palm roughly in between her legs.

A sharp tingle caused her belly to wiggle and her toes to spread under the sheets. She bit back a hiss and blinked her eyes tightly.

_You have to be kidding me._

The cot felt ten times more uncomfortable than it usually did, and her limbs were screaming at her to move. Kel couldn't take any credit away from the fact that her claw hadn't moved from her groin either. She actually was graced by a touch of anger in that moment.

Here she was, in a base full of illegal plasma-contractors, steaming like a desperate doe.

It wasn't that she was horny that pissed her off, moreover it was the everpresent knowledge of _why_ she was horny that made it unbearable.

There was no one else in her life that could touch her. She had never let anyone touch her, not even her own mother and father when she had been tiny, before they had died. She had only ever let Talner touch her. She let him touch her feathers, her claws, her _hips._

Gods, were all males of his species this dense? Or was it just him?

She had never directly asked for it, but she had figured the passive permissions would've been enough. She possessed the physical traits to claim any mate she wanted. Talner was a vibrant, fertile youth. For what little she had seen of his form, she knew it was streamlined with muscle, and that he was slender, and quickly built.

Kel licked her snout again. She now had a craving for chocolate _and_ sex. And there was only one place in the entire universe where she could hope to get both.

_Talner._

The T'vaoan cawed in agitation and wriggled her knuckles into the material of her jumpsuit. She could feel herself through it, bulging, sloping. Everything was much too plush for her normal mood to be present.

Kel was always annoyed at everything around her most of the day, because, well, at the end of all things, the galaxy sucked ass in her eyes.

All that foul moodiness clenched things up a bit, if one could catch her drift.

But at night, when all the other contractors were out like lights, and the nocturnal cycles of her and Talner were about? Kel-Yn-Gor might as well have modified herself into an active basin.

Normally, her kind mated from behind. It was the form of their bodies that forced that prerogative. Males were quite hunched and females were quite capable of arching their backs to support the added weight.

It was why T'vaoans- who already possessed thicker muscles in their legs to make leaps that could transcend several stories –were particularly known for their _hips_ when it came to physical looks.

Ripping the sheets from her, Kel could see that now her mind was looking at everything through a lens of arousal. Her legs were streamed with layered, black-fleshed bands of interlocking sinews and tendons. The insides of her thighs culminated into a tight wedge of constricted skin that invariably hugged the edges of her vaginal trench.

Everything down there itched and _quivered._ The Kig-yar cawed quietly whilst she jammed the knuckles of one of her claws into her slit through the material of her suit.

Linen slipped over itself in the coming seconds as she disrobed. The jumpsuit glimmered in the dark as a discarded heap on the ground. Kel-Yn-Gor gave off a needy caw and worked to spread the taught material of the suit's torso-wrap to expose her erect, black breasts.

The organs slouched like a pair of beanbags over the edges of the suit's opened midsection. She didn't bother pulling all the pieces of the article off. She just wanted an immediate way to access all the sensitive portions of her hide. Perfection in complete nudity be damned.

_Talner._

-His name flooded through her mind like an icy river of water. She remembered the youthful details in his face, his ashy hair and the gleam of his eyes. He was so _alien, _smelling faintly of cologne, towering over her by almost two heads, enwrapped in a coat of creamy, soft skin completely lacking any claws or feathers or fangs…

Finding her organ, the Kig-yar teased at her labia with a pair of daggered talons before slipping the two center fingers deeply between the onyx-tinged lips of her vent. Immediately a slight ejaculation of clear fluids flooded past her knuckles and slipped silently down the crevice between her full rear-end.

Kel's snout shivered and her fangs clacked. The T'vaoan blinked in the dark and began to swivel her leathery palm. The cot squeaked as she kicked her backward-pedaled legs into the air and held them there.

Fluids glistened her talons and moistened a damp patch in the sheets below her. The Kig-yar's crimson throat-warble wiggled like a ripe fruit. An inhuman chirping sound blossomed from her and her feathers itched.

_Talner._

Kel didn't think of herself as an imaginative person, but the images she was constructing in her head were exemplary, to say the least.

She pictured Talner's creamy body hanging over her own. He was thin in these visions, laced with muscle, and powerful with ironed-in experience. She imagined her smaller form bobbing against the cot, his calloused fingers gripping her hips with such force that it hurt. She pictured her avian form rocking with desperation against him, as the human rammed his organ deeply into her personal canal.

_His mating organ._

Kel exhaled in a volcanic hiss. This air turned into a drawn-out, tremoring moan whilst her taloned fingers dipped repeatedly into her hole. The inside of her vagina felt silky in contrast to the more rubbery-feel of her skin. Her claws were like rough extrusions brushing walls of silk.

Her plumage shivered and she clenched her jaws shut to stifle herself from any passerby.

_Eayn's Grace; why can't that human fuck me until it hurts?_

Liquid spilled over her knuckles and ruined the sheets underneath her. Her muscles lapsed and kicked teasingly as she ejaculated, sending the Kig-yar into a series of caterpillar-styled, bodily spasms.

Ironically, her mind clung desperately to the cool sensation of Talner's skin touching hers, and the exotic, musty scent of chocolate. In response, her body overheated, and soon glistening beads of sweat were sprinting down her breasts and her black little abdomen. Her fluids permeated the air with their wafting stench, which smelled closer to some kind of spicy fruit than chocolate.

The T'vaoan gave off a drunken- '_Crawwwwwttt~…_' –like drawl around her teeth and slumped into the cot.

In the moment, she couldn't have felt better.

It was _afterward_ that the realization would set in. Just another night of useless finger-fucking for herself.

She didn't want to use her fingers, she wanted Talner, and most of the days she couldn't even bring herself to admit it.

Kel shut her eyes and stewed with a developing disappointment broiling in her chest. She tried to ward it off by kneading one of her black tits, but the Kig-yar was by now thoroughly adept at killing her own moods.

The magic was gone, as it were.

_Damn._

Kel-Yn-Gor rolled her mandible and made to sit up in her cot. Usually, on the rare occasions where she couldn't control herself, she would find a rag to wipe away all the evidence. Tonight was no different in that sense at least. A spare cloth nearby sapped up all the precious nectar she'd expunged and dampened the already dark stains she'd left on the linen.

_It isn't as if anyone is running room examinations._

She grinned sadly after padding away the rest of her mess.

A vibrant image of her and Talner appeared in her mind. She imagined the two of them in the aftermath of such a bodily union. These imaginary clones were giggling to one another, like conspirators, like children hiding a secret.

Kel's chest fluttered and her feathery mane wiggled down her spine. It was as if her very flesh was becoming angry at her for her unwillingness to accept how lonely she was.

She was a mercenary contractor. There wasn't exactly a great guarantee of companionship in that job description. She supposed it was deserved and just. She'd killed way too many people to earn the rights to happiness anyhow.

_There are pages that cannot be undone._

Kel smiled wider, this time with exhaustion. Her mother's words were phantasms to her and things so old that they threatened to leave her memory forever.

_Some pages can be rewritten. You must fear the ones that can only be touched by our hands once before they are permanent._

Her mother liked to talk about _life_ a lot.

Kel-Yn-Gor regretted having never truly listened to her before she had died, old, and alone, back on T'vao, mending chicks who weren't even hers, being lost in delirium that still made her longer dead father walk the halls of her hut with her after his passing.

She bundled her cast-off jumpsuit and held it close to her chest, feeling the warm enrichments of her arousal as her nerves settled and her cunt stopped itching at her to touch it.

_I'm sorry._

Kel chattered like a crow, smiling venomously.

She had to remember that her mother wasn't listening. Nobody ever was out here, except for one man.

_Talner._

She determined that night, that she would ask the human to run away with her, and soon.

* * *

{👾}


	3. Chapter 3

**Featherkisser**

**3**

* * *

Kuhaga splashed the water over his face and didn't bother drying it off. The coolness it promised was more relieving than the numbers being read to him were.

"Do you want me to keep listing this off, or do you know already?" –Tollen's croaky-voice etched into his hearing, but Kuhaga kept his eyes closed and felt the droplets fleeing down his forehead.

"I've got an inkling." He responded quietly.

"It's time for me to blast off home, Ku'." Tollen slapped the datapad on the rim of the portable sink-unit down with an air of distaste. Kuhaga didn't care, however, because he had long ago given up trying to find activities that _didn't_ annoy the old privateer. "You've got your plasma, I've got my credits. I've stuck my neck out too long and my boys are antsy."

"You just don't like my Kig-yar." Kuhaga grumbled, still intoxicated by the water running down his face.

"You bet your infantry-herded, gaunt arse' I don't." Tollen clucked. "I get you're dumping 'em all off on Refuse, but this mixed crew you got going? It's a darned shame, really, because I thought the war taught you something smarter."

"War doesn't teach, it just forces you to survive." Kuhaga snatched a rag off the other counter and dried his face, staring impassively at the grimacing, pale-skinned giant of a man standing on the other side of the sink. "That's why heroes are always martyrs."

"What about the Spartans?" Tollen smugly grinned. Kuhaga creased his lips. He had almost forgotten about the privateer's strange fascination with the legendary super-soldiers of olde', still said to be seeing new generations back home in Alliance space.

"Never met one." Kuhaga warmly hummed, stepping away from the sink.

"Ah, but ya' saw them." Tollen followed him, crossing his meaty arms over his barreled chest. The fatigues didn't suit him. They stretched and strained against all the muscles. Kuhaga was used to seeing him dressed in full scavenged plate. "On Emerald, down in that market square? They saved a whole planet right in front of ya'."

"They played their part." Kuhaga hid the resultant shiver at the mention of his veteran years. "But everyone on Emerald played their part the best they could. The Covenant still glassed half the equator."

"Half a victory's still better than getting your balls ripped off." Tollen shrugged nonchalantly. "Kinda' brings us back to what we were talking about…"

"Tollen, if you leave now, you're opening us to all sorts of trouble." Kuhaga had reached the other side of his chambers now and was sorting through some of the toiletries hastily piled beside his cot. He found a tube of toothpaste and a pink colored toothbrush.

"Pink?" Tollen almost lost his shit in a series of giggles.

"Shut the fuck up, it was all we had."

"Brass-tacks, Kuhaga, brass-tacks." Tollen held up his giant hands as the sink roared again. "Tg-66's a dry thing. You have your plasma, and the burn-tanks are running so long as you have that bird of yours hitting them in the right spots. If there was going to be a problem, it woulda' happened already."

"_I'm not talking about the crabs._" Kuhaga muffled as he swiveled the brush over his teeth. He spit into the sink and rinsed the brush. "Tollen, I brought you on this operation not just for old times' sake."

"Obviously," Tollen rolled his eyes. "you know better about me working with Covvies' on the same job."

Kuhaga huffed.

Tollen was the leader of a band of contractors who _specialized_ in the kind of protection Kuhaga's engineers needed to harvest the plasma he was so renowned for gathering.

Of course, choice members of Kuhaga's band were no pushovers themselves. Kuhaga himself was a decommissioned NCO of the UNSC Marine Corps, and there was a sniper by the name of Talner Tolworth who was former ODST under his employ.

But for the handful of soldiers Kuhaga's band had at their disposal, they didn't add up to the ex-ONI branch commandos and the trio of ODST 'Hell-Spitters' –that Tollen was running amok with. Tollen was former Arcadian Defense Garrison Special-Operations, and he'd taken to mercenary work much faster than anyone else on Tg-66 had.

Tollen sported an intolerance to non-humans that Kuhaga did not suffer from. Kig-yar were easy to recruit in the Post-War years and made decent soldiers. While Kuhaga could respect that, Tollen could hate it, and always did.

It was the only thing that made them butt-heads, aside from the asinine assemblage of the latter's attitude and the prior's stubbornness.

_Made for each other,_ an old sergeant in the corps had joked during an officer's club meeting.

That night still made Kuhaga laugh.

"I was actually thinking about all this, to rewind," Tollen spoke out loud, pacing towards the back of Kuhaga's chambers. The big man swept his gaze around the room appraisingly, as if he sought something in the natural limestone walls. "-we've been here all this time, watching you lot hoard plasma to sell to people who shoot at our former brothers. I was thinking; should we be ashamed about that?"

"You weren't _us._" Kuhaga smiled politely. "And for me, it's just cruel business."

"I'm just making sure."

"I'm telling you that it's until the burn-tanks are full. Besides, if you take your men away from my digsite _now,_ and something happens, I'll never be able to wire the funds." Kuhaga reminded. "We are on the borders of the Sangheili colony of Kloitan. Do you remember who essentially _owns_ Kloitan?"

"Yeah." Tollen grumbled. "_R'ha,_ or whatever the hell those split-lips call themselves. It's a gun-runner clan, Ku', they aren't interested in this rock."

"Mark my words, if they found us here, there would be issues." Kuhaga denied. "I'm not worried about R'ha as a clan; I'm worried about who they _pay._"

"Maybe they can pay for a therapist to help ya' with this paranoia." Tollen snatched up the datapad by the sink again and smirked at the plasma-readout charts. He whistled. "-For a bird, I gotta' give your engineer credit. He's good, with all this Covvie' tech. What's his name again? Tater-tot? Lucy?"

"_Yamva._" Kuhaga coughed.

"Where'd ya' dredge him up from?"

"Asteroid colony on the rim of Chu'Ot's orbit." Kuhaga said. "He knows Covenant technology better than most. He's the only one I don't plan on leaving behind."

"He's a veteran I take it?" Tollen smiled, looking up from the pad. "Ya' know, of the _war?_" He asked, still smiling.

"Of course." Kuhaga nodded. "Non-combat role, I promise."

"So he says." Tollen shrugged and giggled, looking back down at the pad. Kuhaga eyed the pistol latched to the mercenary warlord's hip purely out of habit.

"Can I hear you promise me that you won't abandon us to the wolves?" Kuhaga grunted.

"Ya' got my word." Tollen sighed. "But it's only for you. Half of these lads you have running about would shrivel in my band, and the other half are _birds_, which means they're good for nothing else but target-practice."

"Ironically," –Said a third voice from the mouth of the chamber. "-they ain't half bad shots themselves for it."

"Talner." Kuhaga greeted with a slight incline of his head. Tollen merely grunted and glanced at the approaching sniper over his broad shoulder.

Talner smiled on thin lips and blinked warmly at the two of them. He was lugging his sniper rifle over his shoulder, fiddling with the release clamp beside the mag eject.

"Good kills this evening, lad?" Tollen looked up from the datapad in his hand.

"Fifteen, sir." Talner nodded. "The land crabs are amok to-night."

"Fancy that shite'." Tollen pocketed the pad and saluted briefly as he wandered out the chamber. "You've got my guns, Kuhaga, alright? Just get your plasma and pop off before I lose my patience."

"Don't sweat." Kuhaga grinned, and turned his attention to Talner, who was watching Tollen until he vanished around the archway capping the hall ahead. "Lower your guard, Talner, he's an ally."

"-Of convenience." Talner muttered when he was sure Tollen was out of earshot. "I don't like the way some of his boys are lookin' at me. I think they think I'm some sort of traitor, I reckon."

"He doesn't like aliens." Kuhaga shrugged. "You hang around that bird too much, Tal'."

"I hold my own." Talner ignored him. "_Yes_ I'm here for reasons."

"Speak."

"The crabs are out of control. When the other guy relieved me, he had to start shooting straight two-secs' after he knelt down." Talner shook his head. "Call me crazy, but I think those cavern-crawling things are learning the rotation cycles of our sharpshooters."

"And Tollen calls _me_ paranoid." Kuhaga uncharacteristically chuckled.

"Can we take it as another sign ta' get the hell off this rock?" Talner blinked.

"Sure." Kuhaga shrugged again. "The burn-tanks are almost full. Yamva's fixing sortes are keeping us on schedule. Pretty soon we'll load up and head on out."

"You haven't told us who the buyers are." Talner said.

"It isn't important."

"I understand."

"Do me a favor and check with the tower relay before you turn in," Kuhaga pointed at the limestone ceiling. "if they smell something, you and me are the first to know."

"Right." Talner shifted the weight on his boots. "…Kuhaga, I need ya' to talk straight with me."

"_…Not this again._" Kuhaga huffed under his breath, earning a galled stare from the sniper in response. "The buyer's contractor, like us. No strings attached. R'ha's dark. We don't have any split-lips up our asses."

When Talner didn't say anything, Kuhaga's features softened.

"I wouldn't screw you." He told him matter-of-factly. Talner suddenly wanted to shoot him.

"…Yes sir." The sniper blinked. "That's… all I needed to know, sir."

"Goodnight, Talner." Kuhaga saluted.

"Goodnight, sir."

* * *

{👾}

The tower team had nothing to report. Talner's efforts to reach them were answered only with the drowsy tech-guy offering a shake of the head and a half-hearted tap of his finger across the screen on his monitor. The scanners were blank, as always. Talner bid the team goodnight and retired, the whole time, his mind awash with paranoia.

The plasma buyers most certainly were not contractors. No bands active in the local subsector had the cash to spend on this much munitions, much less the equipment with which to use it. Covenant tech was a hard commodity for non-Sangheili or Kig-yar led groups, and seeing as Tollen, Kuhaga's warlord buddy was in on the deal too, he doubted the buyers were in any sense alien.

The night was long and mostly sleepless, leaving him with horrid bags under his eyes when he crawled out of the cot and made his morning caffeine brew. The bitter drink ran like molasses down his throat as he roamed the tunnels of the digsite, making his way up to the trench, just to get a whiff of fresh air before his runs.

Existence here was mostly boring, and constantly on edge. He had to remember that as long as nobody was shooting at them, then his job revolved around sitting about and waiting. Kel was the only Kig-yar he got along with, and most of the other humans here he had never met before, and so he had no pattern to fall into with them.

The only other people down here up for conversation- possibly –was _Yamva,_ and he disliked Yamva almost as much as Kel hated him.

Even now, as Talner blinked the dim morning-light of Tg-66 from his eyes, he didn't notice Yamva's diminutive assistant, Taptap, until he had almost tripped over the stout little alien.

"-_Excuse me~!_" Taptap bashfully squeaked at the galled sharpshooter, slipping away with a toolbox tucked under one of his chitinous arms.

Talner watched the Unggoy waddle away quickly and with purpose, shrugging at whatever was so urgent to call the gas-sucker's haste.

_Yamva must have made up something for him to do,_ he sipped his caffeine and thought about it for a moment. _If Yamva hates him so dang much, then why hasn't he killed him yet?_

Talner grunted to himself and scaled one of the plateaux walks skimming the side of the trench. The always gray sky was just a little lighter today and the wind wasn't as brisk.

Across the way, Gingerback yawned like a fierce predator. The big cave roared hollowly in the backdrop as the mineral falls crashed ceaselessly inside its bowels. Even from here, he could smell a slight whiff of sulfur. He tried burying his nose in the caffeine to rid his nostrils of the scent.

"-_Burn-stick?_"

Talner almost jumped out of his boots when someone croaked by his flank.

The ex-ODST whirled around so fast that he spilled some of his caffeine on the wrist of his jumpsuit. Grimacing in annoyance, he found himself gazing past his mug into the creamy eyes of a stout, twitchy Kig-yar of Kuhaga's crew. The male was thin, thinner than even engineer Yamva, and he held a deactivated energy shield in one of his clenched, four-fingered fists. The alien looked so high-strung that veins were bulging on his tan, wiry neck.

"What did you sa-"

"-_Burn-stick?_" The Kig-yar cut him off, his milky eyes darting to Talner's lips, and then to his belt.

"Are you asking for a cigarette?" The sniper cringed, stepping back from the alien's forwardness.

"_Burn-stick. Put in mouth. Puff-puff._" The Kig-yar tried to simulate some kind of sucking motion, but instead, it just came out as a prolonged whistle through his front fangs, he even pinched a pair of fingers in front of his snout for good measure.

"I don't smok-"

The Kig-yar was already stomping away. He found one of Kuhaga's human sentries wandering nearby and didn't even have to ask before the DMR-wielding guard flipped out a cigarette and lighter and lit the alien up without question.

Nearby, Talner snorted in disgust and went on his way.

_I didn't know hookin' 'em on human narcs' was part of the job description for either-or._

Aside from such, it was a relatively clear day, which meant the trench-crabs wouldn't be so crazy and he had some time to himself. The lack of sleep made him sluggish, however, and so as he walked, he failed to return a salute from a passing guard merely because he had been too exhausted to notice.

_I need ta' think about patches,_ he realized with a sense of horror, sipping the last of his caffeine.

At the top of the walk was an overlooking extrusion from the rocks nested behind more rings of boulders and a trio of work lamps. He didn't need to sniff her out to find her, or her favorite spots.

Kel-Yn-Gor was perched up there, on top of one of the sharper boulders, looking down at the trench below, much like an eagle overseeing a wide valley it viewed as its own.

A slight gust of wind rustled the T'vaoan's feathers and made her narrow her eyelids to protect her amber treasures from the breeze. If she noticed his approach, she did not immediately give voice to it. He had to clear his throat to garner her attention.

"Yo." The human grinned, taking a seat on a nearby rock pile.

"Yo." Kel croaked quietly, risking him a single glance, before she returned her gaze to the darkness of the trench far below. She seemed to be searching for something in the shadows down there.

"How're ya' doing?" Talner crammed his empty mug into his belt pouch and slapped his knees to wake himself up.

"You look exhausted." He looked up to find Kel staring piercingly into his soul. It made him jump in his own lap and laugh.

"Yeah, I didn't get many zee's last night." He admitted sheepishly.

"Are you ill or not feeling yourself?" The avian reptile asked, placing one of her lithe legs down and off the rock. She bobbed, almost like a tropical crane mid-step as she lifted herself off the boulder and to his level on the dirt. "…The caffeinated cups normally… _arouse _you."

"There's an interesting word for ya'." He made fun of her with an awkward brow-raise. "-Arouse? You mean, like, _reanimate?_ Yes, I know what you mean. Most of the time, I'm a zombie when I first crawl out of that cot. It's too stiff, these things."

"I agree." She chattered her fangs and nipped at an irritation developing on her shoulder with a nibble of her beak. The red organ capping her throat warbled and she crooned at him, stepping closer. "Are you certain you aren't ill?"

"Nothin' of the sort." He shook his head, chuckling when the Kig-yar cupped his chin and leaned closer to examine him. He swatted her claw away and smiled. "-Hey! I got fifteen of the buggers last night."

"_Fif-teen?_" She mispronounced, her eyes going wide. "-I do not believe this."

"Believe it and weep, honey." He sniggered. "I guess they were just waitin' for the honor of getting killed by yours truly. I'm flattered."

"_Hmmph._" The Kig-yar pouted, her feathers sticking bolt-upright behind her head as she squinted and turned her snout up at him. "Dumb luck." –She croaked.

"Someone's jealous." Talner laughed.

"_Jealous._" She snorted, kicking her foot through some of the dirt. She was brooding. "Jealous of _what?_ Someone who shoots straight but leads in circles?"

"Waitasecnow', _what?_"

"Nothing." Kel quickly wheezed. It would've come out as a cough, but, being Kig-yar, it was instead an avian whistle. It was as if her own beak was on the run from her thoughts, like it was eager to snap at him even when she willed it not to.

That hadn't been what she wanted to say. In fact, she had been talking about _herself,_ and not him. Last night was a cold reminder in the back of her skull, suddenly, and it wouldn't quite go away.

To distract herself, Kel feigned a sneeze and wiggled her neckline. She tried to close her eyes and focus on a crisp wind developing from the west. It billowed calmly down from the eastern reaches of the gigantic trench around them and dissipated orderly.

Sensing her inner turmoil, Talner closed his mouth and tasted the last traces of caffeine on his tongue. He caught Kel-Yn-Gor in a cone of Tg-66 sunlight overhead as it streamed through the trench slit above. It gleamed off the western side of her skull-like beak and highlighted her eyes and her slender, inhuman body.

Obviously, something had her feathers in a twist. But somehow, she looked so… alien. She looked beautiful, even when she was angry.

"Ya' know something," He mumbled, staring. "ya' really are a pretty thing."

_Wait, did I just say that out loud? _Talner screamed in his own mind.

"-_Crawt~!_" She cawed in surprise and blinked at him. "There is no need to flatter me."

"I-I'm just saying-"

"So you killed more of the terrible little monsters than me? It is not a big deal. I do not harbor _resentment_ towards you for it and-"

Kel might have had more to say in there, but she started to slip into her own native tongue, which was almost entirely incomprehensible to him. But, incomprehensible or not, Talner was quick to understand that this wasn't about the crabs anymore.

Enough time around Kel had earned him the skill enough to pick out a word or two. He heard something along the lines of '_last night' _and '_thinking' _–among all the bird-like crows and chatters, but after that, she lost him.

"Heyhey," Talner stood up and placed his hands on her wiry, yet full hips. The Kig-Yar squawked and looked away from him with an embarrassed fluster, her beak chattering as the last traces of her speech died off. "_-serenity,_ honey. Let's find just a bit of serenity in there for ya'."

"_Seren-ity._" Kel mumbled, craning an eye to focus on the center of his cuirass, which was tantalizingly close to her face. "What is this word?"

"Peace of mind and whatnot." The sniper laughed, his accent forcing its way through the gesture to give it its usual tang that she had come to be so fascinated with. "You sound like something big is rattling around in your head. Ya' wanna' talk about it some?"

"It is nothing of any importance." She lightly ghosted from his grip and stood, avian-like before him, unreadable, as ever her alien physique sometimes allowed her to be.

"Maybe not to the job." He shrugged. "But who gives about the job? I'm asking about you. Let's talk."

"Talk." Kel grunted and kicked one of her raptornoid feet. The dirt seemed more interesting suddenly, only because it was easier to stare at and less embarrassing than her human friend. Even right now, Kel couldn't help herself but swoon slightly at his closeness, and the sweet little cologne smell he always trailed. "Yes. Yes, maybe _talk_ would be good."

The human did this to her whenever he was close to her. Whenever he touched her. That, and whenever he gave her chocolate.

Speaking of which…

"…Did you bring chocolate?" She murmured hopefully.

Talner smiled and patted his belt.

"When would I ever show up without it?" He chuckled.

* * *

{👾}

"Take your voice _down_ an octave." Yamva hissed, pressing a creamy eye past his shoulder. "The last thing we need is one of them getting a hint."

"-_But-_" Taptap raised a chitinous finger but stilled himself. Yamva could hear him struggling underneath his mask in the form of raspy currents of undertoning methane. It was very evident that the Unggoy was dangerously close to hyperventilating. "-But me not understand!"

"You don't need to." Yamva snapped, threatening his orderly with a chatter of his fangs. He twisted the wrench again and metal squeaked. "Did you bring the cutter like I asked?"

"_Oh!_ The Burny-"

"_Give it here~!_" –The engineer nearly shrieked, causing Taptap to jump in his own harness and scramble for the toolbox.

Straddling the burn tank's flank, Yamva took a second to claw the metal pipe between his gnarly legs and snarl, attempting to bleed his characteristic rage in a moment of quiet.

Taptap looked endearingly stupid, even when his face wasn't visible. The Grunt's triangular tank was rocking back and forth as he rifled about the box's cluttered interior with his stubby chitin-paws. Yamva normally would've fantasized about some half-baked murder-scheme as he eerily watched his _friend-emy_ from afar, but this time, he was feeling too tense, too strained by time to give such effort.

It was exactly the last problem. _Time._ He was running out of it, if he was correct about the internal politics of the dig site which he knew he was.

Kuhaga was taking the first option out. Tollen's gang was much more reliable than a band of former privateer Kig-yar and ragtag human mercs'. While he didn't fear the prospect of literally being abandoned on a dead-lit Confederate smuggling hole like the rest of his kind here were doomed to, he _did _fear his career from this point onwards.

Tollen was a known alien-hater. It was only a matter of _time _(that damned word again!) before Kuhaga _disposed_ of Yamva once he had repurposed the right piece of Covenant tech. Yamva was in no mood to be screwed into something and tossed away once he snapped, just like the wrenches Taptap was sifting through.

"Hurry up." He growled.

"-Find!" Taptap wheezed triumphantly, waddling back over with a cylindrical shaped piece of purple metal in his grip. "Me find it, Yamva."

"I know." The engineer snapped, snatching the fusion cutter away. Nearby, the burn tank produced a sharp clunking sound that was evident over the roar of the mineral waters. Yamva took his gaze off the pipe underneath him for a second and sneered. "On the verge of death again. The pay isn't worth this. I should've retraced my claws and-" **_Clung~! _**–he ripped out the wrench and tossed it at the box. "-_settled-! _–a long time ago."

Taptap kept on wheezing, even as both their facial features were lit a bright neon pink. The fusion cutter hissed loudly and cast errant, blue-colored sparks. Yamva was chattering and cursing in his native tongue the entire time, ranting about the possibilities, the missed opportunities.

The missed opportunities! He could've screamed anyone's ear off about those blasted things.

This right here was why the war had ended in nothing but a gigantic stink-hole of a mess. It took billions of people, threw them in a swirling toilet bowl and shat them out in every-which-way. Yamva had been lost the moment the Covenant dissolved, forgetting service deployment.

_I wonder what Rykol is doing right now, as I sit here, plotting the demise of the only home I've had in years._

Yamva snorted and clicked off the fusion cutter.

She'd probably nested with some other fool by now. Rykol had that kind of talent. Netting in overeager males looking for a heritage to pass down. Yamva didn't even know where his six chicks were these days. She'd spirited them away before he, and that antique pistol latched to his hip could've stepped in to say otherwise.

"Y-Yamva," Taptap muttered, stepping a bit closer, causing the Kig-yar to flinch out of his thoughts from the stink of methane coming off the Unggoy's harness.

_He smells like ass,_ Yamva quirked an agitated eye at him.

"-Yamva, I not get what we doing. First, you tell me that Old People bad, and that we starting new. Then, you say mean humany people are friends and other Kigg are friends. Now," The Unggoy gestured to the warping cut that had been made on the interior grate-mesh of the pipe. "-now you trying to blow them up."

"You will keep your voice down or I will kill you." Yamva threatened, waving the fusion cutter at him for good measure. Taptap yipped and stepped back from the pipe.

Unfortunately, the little alien stepped _too far_ back, and his heel met the edge of the thin plateau-walk housing the burn tank. Pebbles crumbled, and Taptap whined as he flung out his little arms and spiraled them, his weight tugging on his tank, nearly sending him in a fatal tumble down into the sharp rocks sticking from the mineral waters.

"This is always what I have to deal with, I know it! Some loud-mouthed, gas-sucker who can't count to five and was probably conceived from the rear of his nest-mother." Yamva growled, gripping Taptap by the nose of his mask, and yanking him to safety back on the main plat of earth. "I'm tired of it." The engineer specified, staring with creamy, but blank eyes at the terrified Unggoy. "But I think I'm more tired of _nothing._"

"W-What you mean, Yamva?" Taptap stuttered, afraid to make any other moves besides wrapping his arms over his narrow gut protectively.

"_Isolation,_ don't you see it? Why else would I tolerate you for so long, for all these years? I've found its better to have someone to hate, than to have no one at all." Yamva glowered, not letting go of his mask. "Think of the time I wandered around aimlessly before you. Metal makes poor company, but that is where my profession brought me. You think I don't have demons? I have too many. Here I stand, on the crest of betrayal, and I'm pouring my soul out to a mollusk midget who smells like an unwashed Jiralhanae's anus."

"I-I sorry, Yamva…"

"Not nearly sorry as me." Yamva let the Grunt go, chattered and stepped back over to the pipe. "You wish to know the truth? Fine. I shall relent that _quietly,_ seeing as you're the only one I can trust."

"Really?" Taptap brightened a little bit and fiddled with his fingers. "Yamva always know best, that what I say. All _you_ say true. Taptap never good for much anyhow. Taptap told he never get chosen by Old People because too late in Big War to make difference, but Taptap know truth. I get thrown away, like many of my kind. Because when there not bullets to take we mostly useless. Times and times of wasted hatchlings and wasted generationy things. Once overheard Elite-man saying so, before I ran away."

Yamva paused as he screwed the pipe-hatch shut and glanced at him, grunting something behind his teeth that _might've_ been an affirmation.

Even as angry as he was, he couldn't hold back the summary shock that always came out when Taptap invariably, and continuously proved that he wasn't as fucking stupid as he looked.

Taptap was waiting for the Kig-yar to interrupt him or scold him for cutting off whatever he had been about to say beforehand, but nothing came out of the engineer's beak. Taptap huffed through his rebreather and padded his fingers together.

They clicked _clkclkclk –_in the silence of the water-roaring behind them.

"Yamva?" Taptap asked. "You keep me around to hate me?"

Yamva paused as the hatch went back on. His avian shoulders hunched, and the spines sticking from the back of his narrow head quivered as he chuckled.

"I keep you around because I have nothing else to keep around." The Kig-yar clarified. "That, and you always serve as a reminder that I am not the most depraved thing meandering through the stars. There are those less than me and you're one of them. Having proof of that helps me sleep at night. Does _that_ answer your question?"

Taptap stared at his own feet.

"Yes, Yamva." The Grunt said dryly. He tried adjusting one of the knobs on his mask for methane dispersal, but it didn't seem to help.

"Good. Hand me that wrench," As Taptap complied, the engineer took a glance at the head of Gingerback and started to speak again. "-and for the truth you sought."

"Yes, Yamva?"

"The humans are planning on leaving the rest of my kind on a very bad, desolate planet." Yamva explained. "I doubt they'll include payment with it. They'll probably load everyone up on separate ships, shoot down or disable the others they aren't on and steal the plasma-ore out of the wreckage. And they'll probably kill you the moment I am not looking."

Taptap flinched but otherwise did nothing to react to that.

"Afterwards, Kuhaga, Tollen's men and… and I'm assuming that sharpshooter, _Talner,_" Yamva jealously ground his beak. "will even leave Kel-Yn-Gor to die and will take me as their slave-laborer, probably to repair some significant piece of Covenant haul. Think about it, it's the perfect compromise for the alien hater that Tollen is. Use the engineer to get a Phantom or two going, and then make off for greater jobs and greater pay. Shoot the poor bastard. No witnesses."

"But if group breaking up," Taptap started. "how you get away without pay?"

Yamva's smile was eye-to-eye, for his anatomy.

"_Simple._" He grunted, patting the pipe once he was done. "Give this a day, at most, and watch the lights."

"Then whats?"

"There are three ships on Tg-66. The hauler schooners and the Phantom, tied to the Tower base, at the top of this cave's trench." Yamva pointed up at the ceiling. "The ore's being loaded on all three of them. Each has enough tanks on it to make any one Kig-yar rich. I can deal with the cut-off."

"You take me too?"

Yamva looked back at the Grunt and his smile diminished a little.

"_Yes,_" He relented with a sigh. "I'm taking you too."

"You best, Yamva." Taptap itched his mask.

"I know." Yamva chattered.

* * *

{👾}

A ramshackle lift was the only thing dividing them from Tg-66's surface crust. The thing shrieked, wobbled and sparked all the way up a set of support rungs that had been hastily erected. Talner hated it, not just because of the sitting sensation in his gut that the lift could break and plunge them to their deaths any second, but because of the _racket,_ the mechanisms howled all the time_._

At the end of the day, if his demise was unavoidable, the least the universe could do was make his end _peaceful._

Clambering down a rust-heap of scrap down an entire cliff-trench wasn't exactly a situation worth shitting dandelions over. Especially when you hit the bottom and every bone in your body became-

"Is there something wrong?" Kel asked, her beak full of chocolate. "Talner?"

"-_Wha'? _No. Nothin'." Talner grinned fakely. He hadn't even realized that he had been staring at her that entire time like a bloody creep.

Kel Yn Gor, for her part, nodded almost sagely and went back to focusing on the half-eaten candy bar in her claw. Though she kept stealing furtive glances at him even as the tip of her beak parted and she snuck a bite. Her chewing faltered when the lift shrieked and the platform jolted to a stop. Sunlight dappled off both of them in an instant tsunami of illumination.

"-_Ugh~._" The Kig-yar clicked her teeth and swallowed, bringing up a feathery arm to shield her daggered eyes. "Too bright."

"You said it," Talner grunted, bowing his head a little bit for the combat helm on his head to take the edge off the light. "I feel like a ground-goblin crawlin' out from hell for the first time."

They rarely got surface patrol duties due to the crab problem, and it wasn't like Kuhaga was willing to expend too much leisure time on the operation.

In total, anywhere from thirty human and Kig-yar crewmembers made up Kuhaga's band and around fifteen mercenaries were wandering about with Tollen's colors. Kel and Talner were Kuhaga's only real sharpshooters, and he needed those to control the Land-Crabs at night.

Still, all of that had equaled to a long, drawn-out crapshoot that consisted of hours on end searching around for a whole lot of nothing and occasionally shooting a scavenger. The problem with the crabs was that they rarely attacked en masse, but pinpricked on the edges of the camp with foragers that would go back and bring more swarms if they returned to the trench alive. They were like ants. Big, metal-crunching, dog-sized ants.

"Morning, Tal'." Susanne greeted with a tiny half-grin. She didn't bother acknowledging Kel, who was used to such treatment anyhow.

"Top of it." The sniper nodded, looking around the landing valley, and where the tiny campsite known as the Tower lookout stood.

A wide berth of cragging foothills penned in the arid, small valley on the very edge of the trench. Ahead of them was a rocky bowl of sloping rock, jagged teeth and fields of stalagmites. Two cigar-shaped _Eschell-_class Hauler Sloops were set down on a natural plane of limestone just ahead, flanked by a small pile of empty crates meant to store the mining equipment they were using down in the trench.

Beside the _Eschells_, levitating off a man-sized, repurposed docking dais that had been salvaged from some old pre-Covenant wreck, was a Type-44 Phantom Gunship. The looming vessel hung ten feet off where the humming plasma dais was placed like some kind of fat, shadowy portent.

Talner always blinked whenever he saw it coming up from the lift. It gave him bad memories from the War. He'd seen plenty of people killed by Phantoms when he was in the corps.

"A few of Tollen's boys loaded up with Shackie and took out the old bird, if you're wondering." Susanne reclined in a pink and blue colored fold-chair by the side of the lift ramp. The little aluminum lawn-piece creaked under her weight, seeing as she was in full battle plate and jumpsuit, like the rest of the band, colored black with navy blue over any spare pieces scavenged to replace gaps. "Kuhaga's flipping his head, huh?"

Kel chattered something under her breath as she stalked away from the lift, the sunlight no longer bothering her. Susanne was speaking of the Rotary Lifter they kept up here for air-drops and patrols. It was an old industrial chopper wing VTOL craft based off the military-grade Falcon designation used by the UNSC colonial corps.

They had one pilot for it out here and he was an eccentric little man named _Shackie._ Or, at least that's the name he'd made for himself. Even Kuhaga didn't know what really had been written on his birth certificate, not that anyone cared enough to pursue it. Shackie was viewed as harmless. He was just a floundering boob with flight experience.

"You said it." Talner smiled. "Me and Kel are just doing a quick sweep to get the legs moving."

"Have fun out there." Susanne eyed the Kig-yar's back for a moment and didn't call anything out. Most of Kuhaga's crew were indifferent towards the Kig-yar, but opinions generally were pretty decent with Kel.

After all, she was one of the few aliens here who wasn't a Covenant castoff and actually had a fair grasp on English and some Spanish. Tollen's boys hated her on principle, but, then again, they hated _everybody_ who wasn't human.

"Did that engineer ever give us an estimate?" Talner asked just before he parted with Susanne. "Yamva's been toying with the tanks all day."

"Just another day or two, right?" Susanne faltered a bit in her chair, at least reassuring Talner that he wasn't the only one on his toes.

"_Talner._" Kel impatiently clucked nearby, wandering towards the center of the valley.

"Vox me if anything pops up." Talner pointed at the navy green cloth of the Tower, which in all actuality was a barracks tent laden with all the communications and sensor equipment the band had. He could hear the muffled voices of Huan and Chelsea inside the flaps; the other two goons up here all the time keeping the radios working.

Grak and Liop, the Kig-yar sentries armed with Carbine rifles patrolled deeper in the valley, navigating around stalagmites recreationally with animated arms, distant squawks making evident that they were bickering about some mundane subject like they always did.

_At least some people like the quiet._

The valley breached through a dirt ramp and a clearing. Kel and he were wordless as they hiked it and came to a ridge on the landscape above.

The sunlight was blinding for a second without the protection of the foothills. But now, there was an ocean of rock and sand awaiting them, sloping out for hundreds of miles in any direction ahead. Far to the north, so distant that the rocks were faded with cloud-residue, another massive trench's teeth could be seen wriggling down the land like a gargantuan, spiked caterpillar.

Kel's groan next to him took away his gawking.

"If I lay eyes upon more sand off-world, I shall shoot myself." She grumbled, tickling his hip as she grabbed his belt without even warning him, and wiggled out another candy bar for her to munch on. "I did not think humans were so formal with masquing pleasure on deployments. We're _on patrol?_" –She crooned with amusement. "Yes, I'd assume at some point these rocks will be planning our downfall, up here, all alone and stewing in the wind."

"Ya' never know." He stepped down the hill in a heavy trot, already, his black gear becoming touched with tints of tan from sand-ghosts creeping in the wind. "We're almost outta' here, you'll see."

"You keep telling me this." Kel Yn Gor swallowed the candy bar and threw the wrapper away, making at first to grab her rifle but faltering and settling for fiddling with her talons. Her fingers itched and so did her feathers. It wasn't because of the wind. "Talner?"

"Lay it on me, honey."

Kig-yar were strange in their processing of… of _this thing_ that she was undeniably feeling. At least, in regards to how humans handled it.

_Nesting_ was a quaint term. It stuck around society since the days of sail ships on Eayn, and even when the T'vaoan people had begun to change because of their home's gravitational differences from their homeland. Nesting was a blanket word for the gathering of, obviously, a male and female to produce chicks for the sole purpose of continuing their lines and furthering their race.

Kig-yar did not breed for- as odd for her as it was to say –the _humanity_ of it. Kig-yar did not hold other Kig-yar in that kind of light. An individual was meant to strive for _wealth_ and power and influence. Chicks were just a means to gaining more of those things, or at least, they were _meant _to be.

Kel was too young to consider motherhood, and honestly, the idea of babies made her gut twist.

Not only was she a privateer with a lot of ugly things behind her, but the thought of raising a life after she had murdered so many others made her intestines weak and her eyes water. These were wounds well hidden all around, but they were there and they stung.

Kel Yn Gor didn't want to _nest_ with Talner. She couldn't. Literally and figuratively. So what did one call what she wanted with him?

Was it just for _sex?_

Kel couldn't lie to herself and say she didn't think of Talner like that… at least… a lot of the time…

Kel squirmed in her harness as her avian, backward legs craned, almost peacock-like, to carry her across the sand and soil of Tg-66.

"I want to leave this job." She finally choked.

"You and me both." Talner shook his head, not getting the depth she'd meant for him. "It's maddenin' when you get locked into a routine."

"That is not what I'm saying." She chattered in frustration. "Talner… why is it that you are so smart some days and yet so blind?"

"Just tell me what's bothering you." He relented, and the two of them stared at one another as they walked into the endless wasteland. Even underneath his ODST helmet, she could feel Talner's eyes as they both connected to something that they had been dancing around like pathetic children. "Get it off your chest now, while we got the time."

"It is not such an easy thing." The T'vaoan chuckled sadly. "Understanding… everything, really. My life, before here and now, before this job, and all the others. Think about it like this: I can't even see merit in my own people because I have become so used to blowing their guts out and leaving it at that."

"…I know how it feels." He admitted, shouldering his rifle.

"You do?"

"Killing people." Hollow eyes were underneath his visor. "Yeah, that's a solid bit of poison to mess up your day."

When neither of them said anything, he continued with a slight, sour smirk.

"Enough to mess up _every day__,_ from there on out. And it seems like the galaxy's constantly trying to find ways to keep it going, that killin'." He elbowed the Kig-yar, and chuckled when she hopped back from him with an excited trill. "But hey, at least it's just crabs here this time, right?"

* * *

{👾}

The tanks in Gingerback were rigged to explode via remote. The activator was Yamva's datapad, where he normally kept his notes and specs on all the tech Kuhaga had collected from Covenant sources over the years.

There was part of Yamva that actually felt regretful about what he was essentially planning to do, gutting his own employers and all. But then again, the constant, hateful sneers of Tollen's mercs passing by in their rounds was enough incentive to remind him.

_As soon as you're off this rock, those men are going to shoot you._

Yamva felt nothing when he and Taptap went to the next chamber over, and started to rig _those_ tanks to explode too.

"This would be easier if the birds of prey roosted elsewhere…" The Kig-yar snarled under his beak, grinding his fangs as a pair of Tollen's soldiers hung out in the archway of Alpha Cavern. Alpha was a near duplicate of Gingerback. Yellowed limestone, piss-colored mineral water flowing from vents in the ceiling. The burn tanks here were fat with ore plasma to sell. Yamva felt a twitch in his bulbous eye as he worked.

He was literally using potentially tens of thousands of credits to fuel a bomb. He envisioned a vast pile of lucra-chits- the currency used by many Kig-yar asteroid colonies years before the arrival of the Covenant –and he envisioned them ablaze in primordial fire.

Well, with what he had in mind, thousands of credits being burned would matter little.

"Are your duties complete?"

"Yes, Yamva." Taptap hurried past, his motions made flippant by the bouncing, thudding mass of a large, sealed drum barrel that he rolled across the dirt. "Last drummy all sealed and ready."

Yamva grunted and craned his head around. Alpha had a total of sixteen tanks scattered throughout the natural causeways layering it. He had cut into all of them and rigged each of the feed-lines with a small, home-made disruption node that would cause a kick-back of sparks the moment they were set off. It would bring the chamber down, kill anyone inside, and cause enough panic to give him and Taptap the perfect cover to steal one of the _Eschell_ schooners, filled to brim with plasma drums.

**_Clunk~! _**–went the drum as Taptap bumped into one of the burn tanks, the one closest to Alpha's entrance.

"_Careful, _you imbecile." Yamva snorted.

"Yes, Yamva."

Feeling a nausea-inducing wave of brief panic in his heart, Yamva swallowed and shakily stood as he finished welding shut the last tank's feed pipe. He tossed the fusion lance tiredly into Taptap's box and looked at his datapad, noticing his own claw shaking.

He growled and gripped his wrist. His claws used to shake like that when he had been a hatchling and his father was preparing to beat him. Yamva had hated pretty much every living soul he had ever encountered in his life. But he had never met anyone he had hated quite like his sire. His father was… something else.

So, to help cover his paranoia, Yamva envisioned him as still alive to this day. He envisioned his father, sleeping on one of the burn tanks in Alpha, snoring, intoxicated and plump with the _sihha-seed_ soup he always made his depraved mother cook for him when he returned from off-world duty.

Yamva glared at the fat rotundness of the tank he had sabotaged. He could almost see the scrawny body of his father sprawled next to it, scorched, blackened, steaming and lifeless.

Yamva liked that picture.

He grinned and the quivering in his wrists stopped.

"You finished in there, bird?" One of Tollen's men hollered, standing aside with a sneer as Taptap rolled his plasma drum right between the sentries and out into the tunnel beyond.

Taptap had done that several times now, loading up the last of the _Eschell_'s by the Tower. The time was now or never.

"The repairs are done." Yamva squawked earnestly, hiding the slight tremor in his voice. "The tanks breathe again. It is just one more load before we can all go _home._"

The two mercs sighed in response. They may have hated aliens, but they hated sitting on this damned rock even more with them.

Kuhaga would get his plasma.

Whether he went home with it was an entirely different story.

Yamva was about to step past one of the first tanks he had rigged close to the entrance of the cavern, he ran the blueprint of his plan through his head one last time.

He and Taptap would wait until nightfall. Once night fell, Yamva would take the lift to the ship port above the trench, detonate the bombs and run off with the _Eschell_ before anybody could respond. Kuhaga could never track him, _especially_ since Yamva had been the one who had installed the tracer devices in the rear fuselage shafts of the schooners himself.

He and that gas-sucking runt would be rich, _and_ home free.

_Perfect._

Right as Yamva thought that, grinning with his saurian muzzle, he glanced over at the tank casually, and then froze where he stood.

His eyes locked on the burn tank's feed, where a sizable dent was wrought right into the weld-line from Taptap's drum.

The little monster had hit the feed pretty hard. Hard enough to rattle things. Hard enough to-

**_Schiskk~!_**

-Yamva screeched. The inside of the feed was starting to glow amber, like a dancing flame.

Tollen's goons grunted when the Kig-yar shouldered between the two of them in a blazing sprint, the bird galloping, almost like a gazelle, out into the tunnels beyond. Soon his footfalls fell distant and silent.

"That little prick." One grunted, a man.

"Tollen said the aliens get lost after the job." The other, a woman, clicked her tongue. "That was the last batch." She flexed her brows.

**_Schiskk~! –_**whispered the burn tank's feed again. A snake's hiss.

"Did you hear something-"

Then, Alpha Chamber detonated, and the two soldiers were instantly incinerated.

* * *

{👾}

Susanne crushed the water can and tossed it at Huan's head, hitting him square in the temple.

"Ouch." The comms-man held his hair and glared at her.

"_Ouch?_ That's all you can say?" She shrugged, reclining in the lawn chair.

"What else am I supposed to say, you bully?" He turned back to playing with the scanning rig inside the tent. Susanna had tugged her chair over to lounge just outside the opened flap. It made taking aim at her poor buddy easier with all the cans and wrappers she went through. "I'm not a good insult-spinner and I can't throw anything back."

"I dunno', it's just so nonchalant." Susanne huffed. "Did your mom tell you to not hit girls or something?"

"Yes." Huan rolled his eyes.

"Well, she should know better. Bad girls don't learn any different from bad boys." She snarkily grinned.

"I've got a blip at 32 east." Chelsea called over from the other side of the tent. Huan only glanced at her and kept playing with the rig's dials. Susanne seemed entirely disinterested.

"It's just another devil." Huan said when nobody broke the silence. "I'll bet you a water can that it'll go away in five more seconds."

"Persisting." Chelsea squawked.

Susanne huffed. Neither her nor Huan liked Chelsea a whole lot. She was so robotic all the time, just staring at screens, refusing to partake in the banter the two of them had. Even the Kig-yar wandering around outside the tent were more lively than her. Susanna remembered one time actually playing _catch_ with one of the birds for a whole three minutes with a crushed can. She couldn't recall which of them, though.

Grak? Wasn't that one? And _Liop_ the other? Or was it _Leap?_

Kig-yar names were all gobbly-guk to her anyhow. A bunch of throat-slicing good-for-nothing alley scavs', every single one of them.

"What was the other one's name again?" Susanne took out another water can and tossed it up in the air before catching it. The chair creaked a bit under her back as she settled. "Liop? Leo? Dunlop? That was a tongue-twister. Or it was just so stupid that my brain turned it off and spaced it."

"I'll go with Leo." Huan muttered, itching a dial leftwards a bit as the rig's monitor whined. "I've almost got this, I think."

"Contact blip is moving."

Both of them looked at Chelsea. She was hunched over her scanner table, her eyes locked on a little pulsating dot dancing in the center of her readout.

"I repeat, this thing is moving. It is not a devil."

"We don't know that." Huan still didn't sound convinced.

"God damn it, let me see." Susanne dropped her can and jumped up from her chair, crossing to and leaning over Chelsea's flank. "Is that it?"

"Yes." Chelsea blinked when it moved again, this time, in the opposite direction from where it had appeared. Susanna gasped, and so this time, even Huan was standing up and looking. "Guys?"

"Wire out to Shackie." Huan said quickly, running over to a small locker and ripping the latch-door open. He grabbed a _Vesor_-brand Stut-Rifle and chucked it to Susanne. "Get him to land back here quickly. I'll go get the boomer."

"I'll tell Kuhaga." Susanne nodded, patting Chelsea's shoulder. "Keep an eye on it, and don't let it off the grid."

"Is it a ship?" Chelsea asked.

"That, or a flying space pig for all I know." Susanne made to run after Huan and then froze. "Oh crap, Talner and that bird are out there too."

"Should I tell Shackie?"

**_Thwump~!_**

-Both women jumped and ran to the mouth of the tent. The lift had just clunked into place outside on the trench rim, and, waddling down from its platform, rolling a plasma drum, was engineer Yamva's little assistant, Taptap.

The Grunt got the drum on the correct angle and was just rolling it towards the _Eschells_ when he noticed the two humans staring at him. He stopped rolling, leaned an elbow on the drum tiredly and waved at them enthusiastically.

"Taptap loading last haul, like boss-man says." He giggled. "Nothing sussy-pickious here!"

Huan- ignoring the alien –ran over to a fabricated metal sheet nearby in the sand, with an object hidden beneath a tarp placed in its center. He ripped the tarp free and let the wind take it, revealing a mounted, foot-pedal Guass-Cannon setup. Huan leaped onto the skeletal frame and activated the targeting computer, heaving as he yanked the man-sized barrel to face the desert sky above.

**_Bmmmmmm~! –_**suddenly, the ground was rumbling.

"We're under attack!" Chelsea trembled.

Susanne didn't know whether to deny or agree to that. She was too busy staring at the orange mushroom cloud rising from the trench right behind Taptap and his drum.

"…That… wasn't supposed to happen yet." The Unggoy mumbled, even as his mask became highlighted at its edges with a vibrant, orange keen. He squeaked and started rolling the drum faster.

* * *

{👾}

"Get me a list of losses and get everyone outside. Start getting ready for a pullout." Kuhaga was barking orders left and right, hopping down one of the trench's causeways, half-naked and still trying to yank on his own fatigue pants. "Tollen!"

"On it." Tollen passed him by in a dexterous jog, tossing a Magnum as he went, which Kuhaga barely caught after he finished shimmying into his pant leg. "We've got a breach in Alpha Chamber, lads, form up with Tower defense and let me and the boss see what's going on."

"_Martheen and Duos were at that post._" –Crackled from Tollen's earpiece.

"I know." He said grimly.

"The engineer was there too." Kuhaga yanked the Magnum's hammer and sprinted, shirtless, between a handful of his Kig-yar scrambling to get to the Tower lift and out of the trench. "If he's gone, then the whole op is over anyhow."

"_If he's gone._" Tollen was murmuring under his breath. "This is what you get when you work with aliens, Ku', lots of shrapnel and dead folk lying around to high hell. They can't really do much else except kill and maim, even when they aren't trying to."

Only seconds after the explosion had the techs up at Tower voxed him about the mysterious blip that had appeared out in the deserts over the trenches. Kuhaga would be damned if that blip and this breach weren't connected. If it was R'ha, then they needed to move quickly before the clan could mount an effective attack.

Tg-66 was a pile of dirt, but it was still in that Sangheili band's territory. Kuhaga had never understood R'ha's fascination with Tg-66 or their refusal to get at the fuel-plasma ores flowing in its subterranean waters. All he had known was that they could've hidden here and gotten rich in record time.

In and out. It should've all been simple.

Now something just had to break. Part of him wanted to be mad at Yamva, but part of him was also mad at himself. Yamva had been warning him for days that the tanks were being driven into poor condition. It seems like his impatience had cost them both dearly. Or R'ha was already here and upon them.

The trench was drowned in rock-dust. Tollen shouldered through his own men and Kuhaga's gang as he beelined for the disturbance.

A trio of Kig-yar lithely dodged around Kuhaga as he ran, like a pack of agile gazelles, their cloven feet carrying them at shocking speeds that no human could hope to match. One of the Kig-yar looked vaguely familiar.

Kuhaga screeched to a halt and made to whip around and grab the alien. He clenched a scaly, salty-smelling arm and tugged hard, earning a sharp shriek that echoed through the choking dust around him.

"_Yamva~!_" He barked, jamming his pistol into the Kig-yar's beak. Kuhaga didn't know what to say after that.

_You're alive? So you must have done something! _–perhaps?

It was irrelevant. The Kig-yar in his clasp snarled at him and blinked one of its near translucent lids as it licked its teeth.

"Yamva? _Hagh~! _Yamva shriveled and burnt husk by now probably." The mercenary sneered. Not Yamva.

Kuhaga lowered his gun and released the avian's arm. The thin creature snarled before running back to catch up with its fellows.

"Run too, boss! Should run too!" It howled back.

"_Kuhaga!_" –Tollen's voice rung from the smog up ahead. "-_Kuhaga!_"

"I'm coming." Kuhaga mumbled to himself, coughing as he plunged into the smoke. The tunnel was a blinding hell. He bumped into rocks, walls and almost tripped over a few crates left in a corner.

Soon, through memory, he navigated to the entrance arch for Alpha Chamber. Immediately, his nostrils twitched as his nose picked up the smell of seared flesh and burnt hair.

Kuhaga grimly looked down at the blackened remains of a human arm, blown off its original owner and cast haphazardly into the scorched dirt of the tunnel. It was missing three fingers, and rubbery bits of a fatigue vest clung around the elbow.

"Tollen? Where are you?" Kuhaga stepped over the arm and pressed through the cracked arch. The smoke swiveled and cleared slightly, revealing Tollen, who was standing rigidly, his eyes locked on something below. "At least the whole chamber didn't come down." Kuhaga coughed, grabbing the merc's shoulder and shoving him aside. "-What are you looking at?"

"I'm looking at what your bird just did." Tollen mumbled, pointing.

Kuhaga swept dust from his eyes, and then found himself gawking.

Alpha chamber was gone. The rivers flowing through the rocky ground had vanished. The _ground_ had vanished. The tanks across the chamber were nowhere to be seen and everything was painted a deep black from the pure heat. Flames still cracked along edges of rock, and steam shot out from falls of mineral water dappling from the cracked ceiling and onto the flame pyres. Jagged scrap metal from the tanks was embedded everywhere. A scorched human foot was nearby too, crisping as cinders danced across the pitch-black heel and bloody stump.

Where the floor had collapsed, and what shocked the two men, there stood something in the rubble.

Peaking from the mounds of earth and stone was a ruined, chiseled, and badly burnt figure. It was easily ten feet tall, down a three-story drop below, situated in the center of a buried antechamber lined with crumbling pillars, sweeping, vine-patterned stone plates with a plain dais in the heart.

At the foot of the Sangheilian statue, partially submerged, and very cracked, was a sarcophagus.

Even through the smog clouding the room, Kuhaga could see the small flashing light of a tiny, purple, arachnid device placed on the rim of the coffin. The security tripper blipped red from a central bulb, in the rocks, from where it had been knocked off the tomb's lid.

Tollen broke the silence with a slight, venomous chuckle.

"Yep." He grunted. "Fuck me."

* * *

{👾}


	4. Chapter 4

**Featherkisser**

**4**

* * *

"Was _Ta-Vow_ a lot like this place?" Talner asked.

"_T'vao_ was nothing like this rock." Kel clucked in amusement at his mispronunciation. "T'vao was a different kind of home. It was… _ehm…_"

"Ya' need a word?"

"Let me think of it." Kel shook her head politely. "…_Flower-y._ No. _Poetic._"

"Poetic?" The ex-Helljumper sounded confused as they hiked a dune. "That doesn't sound right."

"But it is very true." She insisted, beating him to the summit and watching him trudge the rest of the way up past her beak. "You cannot say it in so many words without it being confusing. Y'deio is not a sphere of simplicities and it is very complicated how people have changed from one another."

"Uh-huh." Talner said very seriously, listening intently as he capped the ridge and huffed.

"T'vao changed. They all changed, all of the colonies. It is the will of _Kig-yar,_ to seek what is not known, and, yes, unfortunately, to also plunder what might belong to the vastness of space." Kel licked her muzzle and scanned the desert around them, their position offering a spectacular view. "But the veils of princedom never spoke to me. It was just a means to a meal."

"So, you're sayin' that _you_ sum up Ta-vow pretty good then?" Talner smiled. "You're a product of home."

"I would not be saying an untruth agreeing with that." Kel shrugged. "Yet that isn't what I meant. T'vao breathes family and it breathes individuality. Families of my people are tightly knit social groups who maintained superiority through honor, swiftness and brutality. Streets were chopped up among petty princes and their lines. But they were not the scavenger scum you see from _Eayn._ Ancestors, no."

"You don't like Eee-en?"

"_Hmpf~._" She huffed, laughing at his words for her language, her feathers quivering with glee. "My tastes never quite took to it, no."

"Earth never really seemed all-that to me either. Ya' know, just because the road started somewhere, doesn't mean it didn't lead to something better at the other end." He reached out and cuffed her smaller shoulder playfully. Kel crooned and kicked her clawed foot through the sand like a pawing cat, her muzzle turning a slight shade of purple which was thankfully for her hidden by the high sun above. "We're both offworlders, eh?"

"It appears so." Kel hummed, and then she grabbed his belt again, yanking it towards her as her amber eyes darted about inquisitively.

"You ate all of it." He laughed at her sharply, doting on the shorter alien. "But heck, what I'd give to be a chocolate factory. It'd be something to make up for all the horrors."

"Why would _you_ want chocolate? _I'm_ the one who craves it." She licked her teeth and peered up at him, her feathers _poofing,_ like a blooming, black sunflower behind her head. "It is the processed chemicals your kind uses, I am sure."

"-I'd wanna' be a chocolate factory just to see you smile more." He quipped. Kel made a flourishing noise of embarrassment and let his belt snap back onto his plate. "At least I know that _that_ ain't a wrong thing to wish for."

"Maybe not." She nursed her Needle rifle. "Talner?"

"I'm here."

"How long have we been doing this?"

Talner scrunched his brow. That was a question he had to think about.

If they were going just by _Kuhaga,_ then that was two years. Talner had joined up with Kuhaga shortly after the Primion Campaign, to escape the Jiralhanae he had so angered by killing their Chieftain in the world's mushroom jungles. Talner wished all this time later that he _hadn't_ tried to spring out of retirement like that. It was a stupid stunt, one that a _kid_ made, a really stupid kid.

And yet for some reason, that stupidity- of his own volition –had made him hate the UNSC even more than he already did.

The Alliance had never spoken his tongue. He'd disliked it from its conception to the present. He did not hate non-humans, and he did not hate his own kind, but the trauma, the things that High Command had ordered him to do…

Unforgivable. At least to him.

Primion was a mistake, and, so too was Tg-66. At least probably. Combat was a narcotic Talner did not know how to live without. The only way to stop the nightmares was to live them so that they did not return in his sleep.

Yet, every time he hungered for its usage, he despised himself for it. It was self-destructive. Perhaps, that was why he had warmed up so quickly to Kel, fifteen months ago, when a timid, avian alien had wandered up to him on the deck of _Alpine Timberland, _the astro-colony orbiting in the belt of Desilos-9.

She had come over to him because she had intended to rob him. She had just gotten the bad end of a job, and T'vaoan gangers were prowling the market-levels of the habitat seeking to kill her. She was unarmed, and she wanted the sidearm and combat knife that Talner had unwisely left unhidden on his belt.

Talner remembered the first thing he had done.

"Hey," He said in his accented, sharp voice, which made the T'vaoan female stop in her tracks, and it was the first time her amber, lizard-like eyes fell on his face. He smiled at her, and held out a candy bar for her, one of two that he had planned on eating. "You're look'n rough there, darlin'. Wanna' bite?"

Kuhaga hired her when he found them in a lucra-bar in the lower decks of the habitat. Kel and he had chatted for hours, and subsequently discovered several booth-games with holoscreens that were worth playing. They were currently gathering crowds as they both were unable to beat each other's scores at marksmanship simulators. On the edges of the crowds, a small band of seven other T'vaoans lingered, trying to hide blamite blades in their belts. They were still cursing and hewing as more and more of Kuhaga's men came over and inadvertently spooked them. They never got Kel.

Kel looked younger than, even though it had only been barely over a year. The jobs since her induction into a band of mostly human contractors had aged her. She had seen and done things that had changed her persona forever.

Talner missed the small amount of innocence left in her eyes. The saurian, toothy grin down her beak as she straddled the mount-chair for the booth beside him, clicking the plastic triggers and blowing away legions of holographic, undead horrors lumbering ever closer to the undefeatable pair.

Blue lights from the illumination of the lucra-bar. Kel had looked like a skull-faced, azure creature. Her back had been arched, her pert, black chest and feathery plumage presented, catching the blue beams from the screen and fixtures overhead, her eyes contrasting it all in healthy shades of gold.

Talner never admitted the fascination he had with her body to anyone, except Kel, but never outright. He had a feeling she knew.

Kel Yn Gor, for her part, was staring at him as they stood silently on the top of the dune. Her inhuman snout was unreadable to him, but the expression on her face was at least _soft,_ and that much he knew.

"Has anyone ever told you that you are a freakin' amazing person?" He asked her finally.

The Kig-yar's physical appearance changed before his eyes. The strangest look bloomed all across her face and body. It was as if an invisible, very cool breeze was caressing the reptilian, touching her, whispering revolutionary things to her.

Kel's eyes became very heavy and her feathers were quivering so fast, that they appeared as fluttering dragonfly wings over her head and shoulders. Talner wasn't thinking about anything he did. He knelt in the sand, and he dropped his gun on the dune. Her strangely sculpted claw was entwined with his fingers next, her hide calloused here, and rougher in comparison to the smooth, fleshiness that wrapped her soft, hunched body and her legs.

_Her legs._

Talner's hips became warm. Kel chattered a sound that mimicked the pleased trill of a small house-bird. The Kig-yar bent her snout down, and soon, her forehead merged with his in a quaint tap of skin.

Talner blinked as he felt desert-wind licking his hair. His eye darted down beside his knee, where his helmet's blue visor stared back up at him silently.

He hadn't even realized that one of them had taken it off.

"_Not in that kind of way before, no._" Kel chuckled through her teeth, shutting her eyes as the full weight of his own accent hit her.

He certainly wasn't a poet, and she didn't totally get the idiom around _freakin',_ but she got the point.

"'Bout high time, then." He muttered, rubbing his hand down her lithe, black arm, teasing the feathers at the rear-shoulder-blade between his fingers. He made her croon quietly and she pressed the tip of her snout into his chin, taking in his scent with a heavy huff. "It's been long enough, to answer your question."

"If you have an answer for that one, then you must too for my next one." She pulled back a little and lowered her gaze. "Talner… I want-"

**_Bmmmmmmmm~…_**

-Both of them whipped their heads back towards from where they had come.

Their eyes followed the gradually vanishing duo of footsteps they'd left in the sand, one path the rounded heels of a hominid, the other, a barbed pattern of claw-prints. Up and past the rise of a few dunes, they could see the blooming edge of a fiery mushroom cloud's iris.

Something at the digsite had exploded.

"Holy shit." Talner jolted to his feet and picked up his helmet and gun. "_Hello? _Talner to Tower, hello? What's happening over there?" He rambled as soon as he got the helm over his head, clicking the comm bead repeatedly.

"That was an internal explosion." Kel gracefully strode over to a sharp series of boulders and hopped several feet to perch on the tallest spire in the formation. She shouldered her rifle and leaned close, scrutinizing the distant, evaporating plume. "One of the burn tanks must have finally ignited. Or someone was a complete idiot and set it off by accident."

"How the hell did that cloud reach the top of the trench like that? The entire digsite's gotta' be a crater from that kind of force." Talner switched off his rifle and punched his helmet's bead again. "Nobody's answering."

"Look." Kel pointed at the cloud. As it was dissipating, the ghost of the plume was colored a faint greenish-yellow, almost sickly in its shade. "It's being fed by ore-plasma. It was most definitely a tank. That does not equal force."

"At least we can hope." Talner grunted. "Damn us if that took out any of the ships at the Tower. Those things are our only way off this rock."

"-_only air asset call-in- ackie, maki- ques- to tak-_" –A broken garble hissed in Talner's feed.

"Link this." He pointed at Kel, and she scrambled down from her perch, clicking a small rune on the collar of her harness to join the feed. "Who is this? You're breaking up. Confirm."

"-_alner-? –Th- ackie- taki –ight path towards your position. I say again, this is Shackie, me and my team are flying towards you. The digsite's had an accident, and Tower's scans have a UFO in our vicinity. Do you hear me? We're consolidating. The operation's done. We're pulling out._"

Talner and Kel shared looks. Neither could really read the other in that moment. Was it apprehension, relief or fear? Probably some strange hybrid of all three.

"Shackie, we're about one-point-six kilometers south of the Tower, heading from the mouth of the landing valley. We're beside a boulder formation, copy?" Talner voxed.

"_High-ho, Talner, I copy. For a second, I thought the damned sand swallowed you or something. I am inbound, hold your position._"

"The scans have detected a contact?" Kel parroted as they both took off from the link. "If it is a ship-"

"Let's hope to shit it ain't." He shook his head. "Watch the horizon, we gotta' make sure whoever flies over our heads is on our side."

The once peaceful dunes now seemed rife with menace. Both sharpshooters nodded to one another, and Talner gestured for her to take the north. He immediately tossed himself to his belly in the sand and clicked a few adjustments into his scope. He hunkered behind a rock ridge and scanned the skies, his heart pounding in his chest.

With limited effectiveness, his gun could take out a lightly armored airborne vehicle if the shot was precise enough and in the right place. But that was assuming the unidentified craft- if it even _was_ a craft –was something like a _Banshee_, or a Hornet or similar VTOL. Something told him that if it was just one contact, the likelihood of it being something bigger was higher.

He glanced over his shoulder to see Kel on the other side of the rocks. She was behind a boulder, still as a statue, with her gun craned over the rock's lip towards the north. She truly displayed her skill at the art even just by going through the routines. A tiny reminder of his prior experience with her still lingered. Their words for each other would have to wait.

Eventually, the pitter-patter thrumming of propellers echoed in the distance.

"_Contact._" Kel's voice hissed in his comm-bead.

Talner rose to a kneel and sighted down the north with his scope. The eagle-shaped nose of Shackie's Rotary Lifter met him in the tiny bubble. The craft veering to the west as it circled their position. He could see Shackie's outline in the cockpit. He was waving.

"-_I see you, Talner. I'm coming in for a landing, join the lads. And bring your bird too._"

The link gave off static as Kel huffed. Talner jogged through the sand and she just strode over it as the Rotary Lifter screamed down to ground level twenty or so feet away, kicking up a translucent tornado of dancing sand devils about its belly and flank. Its open bay was stuffed.

Two mercs wearing armor-pad suits similar to his were standing in the center, grasping roof-handles as the craft settled into a hover. A pair of Kig-yar and two other humans from Kuhaga's crew sat in the jumpseats, all of them looking straight at the two wanderers.

"_Get in~!_" –One of Tollen's men faintly roared over the blades. Talner and Kel ducked under the rotary spins and he stopped to let her leap in first before joining her.

"_Everyone settled back there?_" Talner gripped a roof rail with Kel, and Shackie's voice echoed in his helmet.

"We're in, Shackie, get us back to the digsite." Talner voxed, exchanging a look with Tollen's soldiers who were eyeing the three Kig-yar in the bay with distaste.

"_This is gonna' get rough. I'm throttling it, so hold the hell on._"

Kel had boarded way too many ships in her cross-piracy mercenary career to be afraid of some fancy flying maneuvers, and he was a former Helljumper. Shackie was trying to reassure a group of invincibles to G-force-fear.

The Rotary Lifter roared as it lifted straight up into the desert sky, the dry terrain below shrinking until the rocks that he and Kel had been sheltered around appeared small, and holdable in the palm of his hand. Wind rushed through the bay and one of the human contractors stumbled in his seat.

"Christ, Shackie, I didn't think you were serious." He dumbly shouted into his mic. "My balls just got slurped up my ass."

"_Welcome to the Desert Hellhole Skyway. We hope you enjoy your fuckin' flight._" Shackie cackled and everyone lurched as the craft nosed north. "_Now all of you shut up. I'm trying to get a link to Tower. Susie' ain't answering._"

"They're all dead, Shack'." One of Tollen's mercs shook his head. "That explosion was total. You're talking to air."

"The explosion was from ore-plasma." Talner rebuked into the link. "It was following the air-flow out of the trench. It didn't necessarily wipe out the entire dig. Keep trying, Shackie."

"_Tower, come in tower._" Shackie repeated again and again. The desert swept below them as they covered what short distance remained. Soon, the teeth marking the Crag Belt's top rim became visible. It was just a few minutes flight time away.

"-_Shackie, this is Tower._" It was the voice of Chelsea, one of the comm techs in the Tower base. "_Come in._"

"_There's somebody._" Shackie sighed. "_Wing to Tower, I got all souls aboard and am hot for the digsite. Mind telling us what the hell happened?_"

"_Shackie, break off course now!_" Susanne barked into the link. "_The unidentified blip just rocketed over the Dassel Plains, just south of you. It's locked in on you and is closing rapidly. Adjust path! Break!_"

"_Jesus H. Christ._" Shackie sounded like he was merely rolling his eyes in mockery of the statement, but then the Rotary Lifter ripped to the west and rapidly began to lose altitude. Tollen's mercs cursed and knelt in the bay. Talner protectively lashed out an arm and wrapped it around Kel's midsection, making the T'vaoan wince through the wind whipping over her beak to stare up at him as she held on for dear life.

Shackie swept the Lifter lower and the wind howled. Sand dunes passed right underneath the belly of the craft and soon gave way for a sheer drop of rocky cliffs.

"_Yeah, boys and girls, we are going down in that. Just hang on. I'll lose them._"

Tg-66 was riddled with thousands of deep trenches just like Crag Belt. Shackie dipped the Rotary Lifter past the cliff face and into the darker space between this new, unnamed trench's ribs. Towering basalt spires layered up from the darkness below, and Shackie had to swerve left and right in agonizingly slow weaves to dodge the rocks.

"_Tight fit down here._" He breathed.

"You idiot! You're gonna' get us killed!" The same soldier who had been complaining about his nuts barked as he clawed his seat, his eyes bugging as a basalt spire passed hideously close to the spinning edges of the left propeller. "Just stop the damn thing and hide behind some of the stacks!"

"_Shackie, that thing is following you. It's in the trench._" Susanne said over the link. "_I think you're losing it though, it's weaving, looks confused._"

"No doubts about it being a darned ship then." Talner called. "Susanne, not that this is a grand ole' time for this, but ya' mind explaining what the hell happened over there?"

"_Burn tank rupture. Multiple casualties. Kuhaga and Tollen are evacuating the op._" Susanne sounded like she was withholding something. Still, Kel scoffed through her beak.

"Was one of the casualties that cunt of an engineer and his toady?" She asked.

Talner was too engrossed in Shackie's weaving to laugh at her use of the curse word. A heightened sense of dread was building coldly in his guts about the other presence in the basalt stacks with them. Another _thing_ was out here with them, and it had followed them. The Rotary Lifter wasn't armed, and that made him terrified. No amount of combat experience ever got rid of that assurance in a soldier's life. _Fear_ was very real and always would be at his or her side until the end.

"_Just one last stack pile._" Shackie voxed, and the craft weaved one last time. "_Shit, now that was some good flying. I think we lost it._"

Suddenly, the air whooshed and Shackie cursed. The Rotary Lifter jolted backward and the afterburners kicked orange fire, nearly throwing everyone in the bay forward.

Talner gripped the hold over his head until his fingers were white and numb. He leaned out the bay's flank, risking the insurmountable blackness below his chin. His eyes went wide as a fat, glistening, metallic thing shot out from the space right underneath their bird and hovered menacingly just overhead the cockpit's level.

It was a bulky spaceship, three times their size, wreathed in reflective chrome, red and yellow colored synthetic metal. It wreaked of alien architecture and left its identity not wanting.

Emblazoned across the bulbous, porpoise-like nose of the serpentine ship's fuselage was a glowing gold sigil of a split-mandible skull run through with a crimson blood drop.

It was the sigil of the Sangheilian Clan of R'ha. A double-mouthed plasma cannon mounted on the Dromon-Class Dropship's chin swiveled up to point right at them.

"_Jesus H. Christ._" Shackie said again. The Rotary Lifter screamed and the bay's occupants felt their guts slam into their boots. Up they went, and a hissing stream of blue plasma bolts whistled in a near glance just below the Lifter's belly. As the sky rapidly descended to meet them, Talner- swinging in his position from the ceiling grip –looked down at the shrinking trench to see the Dromon rising up and giving chase.

"Shackie, she's on us." He blinked.

"_Sangheili._" Kel spat, gripping Talner's arm and squeezing.

"_Tell me Huan's on the boomer._" Shackie voxed as he gunned the Lifter for the digsite again. The Dromon's repulsors warbled loudly almost in mimicry to the cry of a descending, alien, predatory bird behind them. Shackie banked left and a blast of searing plasma whisked past the Lifter's ribs.

"I'm gonna' _puke, man~!_" The nut-guy hollered. "-_And_ I'm too young to die like this!"

"_Huan's on the boomer._" Susanne voxed. "_Damnit, that thing is fast._"

"_You're telling me._" Shackie grunted and gunned the afterburners again.

Behind them, the Dromon was steadily keeping pace. It loudly droned through the desert sky, whipping over the dunes despite its fat bulk.

The eel-like ship was a design unique to the R'ha, tracing its lineage back to the ancient age of technology predating the formation of the Covenant, when the Sangheili were first settling their core worlds.

It spoke of its time thousands of years later with grace and agility. Dromons were capable, if not limited only by their lack of troop space. But just because the bird was old did not mean it would not kill them. Their only hope in the Lifter was to _run._

"Susanne, what's the status of the rest of the digsite?" Talner asked as he glanced back at the pursuing ship. There was a long moment of merely static, and even Shackie was listening in without interruption. "_Susanne?_"

"_The burn tanks breached Alpha Chamber._" She crackled.

"And?"

"_We were digging into a catacomb complex. It's been completely ripped open._" Nobody in the bay spoke, and then, to capitalize the audacity of what was happening, Susanne added: "-_There was a security monitor on one of the tombs._"

Nearby, Kel chuckled sourly under her breath.

"_I am surrounded by fools._" She uttered.

"Tg-66 is a burial world." Talner laughed, hanging his head. "And we didn't even see that comin'."

**_Bang~! _**–one of the Rotary Lifter's wings vanished in a blast of fire, shrapnel and soot. Kel screeched as she was nearly ripped from the bay. Talner hooked an arm over her ribs and caught her. One of Kuhaga's contractors was not so lucky. The Kig-yar was sucked out in a wind current with a muted squawk. He flipped end over end once and vanished past the tailfin.

"_Yeah. I'm going down._" Shackie beautifully punctuated the scene with his nonchalant quips. The Lifter spun clockwise and whipped all the bay's occupants to the west. One of Tollen's men screamed as the G-force yanked him so hard from the roof-latch that it dislocated his arm, broke all his fingers and sucked him through the bay's leftwards space. He hit the still active rotary propeller and vanished in a fine crimson mist to mix with the soot trailing above them.

Talner felt his legs lift off the plating and he hung onto the latch over his head with all his might. Swinging once, twice, three times. Over and over the desert outside whipped by in a vertigo-inducing pass. Kel was screaming. He hugged her smaller form to his body and held her there. He would not let go.

No matter what, he would not let go.

* * *

{👾}


	5. Chapter 5

**Featherkisser**

**5**

* * *

All Talner could think about was the smell of crisping pork chops. The scent was familiar to him, even though he hadn't actually had pork for over fifteen years. He remembered that his aunt and uncle used to cook pork chops, on their ranch in the middle of the Roemio State wilderness, on his homeworld of Sasewaschke.

Talner had had their pork chops once, when he and a few friends had stopped by after an evening of drinking. Those pork chops, and his aunt's stern, passive-aggressive delivery of remarks on how he was wasting his life away, sobered him up real good.

It was weird that it took an airplane crash to remind him of that very elusive strip of memory. But, as he had learned long ago when he was still in the corps: combat was a hellish thing. It rarely made sense.

His eyes snapped open to reveal the desert sky above, tinged darkly through the blue visor of his ODST helmet. Talner coughed and tasted blood between his teeth. Dust was swirling everywhere and the sun was flickering.

He had first thought something was wrong with one of his eyelids, but after a few more blinks he came to realize that the sun was flickering because something was constantly passing through its beams. It was the Rotary Lifter's sole remaining propeller blades. They were still turning, like a creaking, vertically facing windmill. Four black swords eeking out right over his head, whispering and cindering.

_If I'm here, then why the hell does it smell like aunt Khar's pork chops?_

-A normal man would've asked that question.

But Talner knew better. It all made sense.

He sat up painfully, his spine screaming and his legs numb. He gripped his suit's collar and wheezed in an attempt to calm himself down. Just ahead of his boots, he stared blankly at the scorched and mangled corpse of one of his fellow contractors. He vaguely knew the identities of most of the people in Kuhaga's band alongside him, but in the moment, either due to adrenaline, sheer confusion from all that had happened or pure ignorance, Talner was drawing a blank on this poor slob's name.

Not that anyone would ever be able to identify him again. The man's face was a sloping, black plain of crumpled, rubbery flesh with the forehead of his skull starting to emerge like a white bilge of charcoal from his wrecked brow. He was missing a leg and the other one had been bent so far back that he was sitting on his own kneecap.

Talner coughed again and looked around the crash site. He had been tossed a few feet outside the bay, and discovered that the Rotary Lifter had actually remained in relatively good condition, for how much its catastrophic death warranted.

It was lying angled on its belly, dark soot leaking from its ruined ribs and ripped-off wing-stub. The cockpit was shattered and he could see spatters of dark blood inside the glass decorating the entirety of its bubble-like interior.

They had landed in the middle of a dune valley, and Talner recognized it as the one he and Kel had crossed to reach the point where Shackie had picked them up from in their little nature-walk.

As he made to stand up, he felt his chest scrunch into his own ribs as a cold feeling of dread stabbed into his heart.

Where was Kel?

Talner jumped to his feet and then immediately tripped and fell flat on his face. Grunting, the ex-ODST glared down at his ankles, and sighed so loudly that it caused the vox-grille on his helmet to wheeze.

Kel was there in one piece, draped over his ankles, unmoving. The T'vaoan looked quite peaceful, even though there was still a possibility that she was dead. Her harness wasn't rising and falling with its usual motions of breathing. The crackle of fires and the howl of the wind echoed silently, even as the latter tickled the edges of her flattened feather plumages.

Talner mumbled incoherently. He flopped over to her and propped the saurian up, manhandling her very light body to drape her in his arms and lap. Kel limply flowed past his forearms and her beak tilted back. He grabbed her scalp and supported her, staring at her closed eyes.

Feeling his teeth clench painfully, Talner opened his mouth but couldn't find any words. His quivering hand reached up and placed itself over her forehead. He was completely silent in the minutes following.

"-_Hey,_"

Talner gazed over his shoulder as he cradled his friend. He saw Shackie tumbling over some sand piles that had gathered around the chin of his craft's shattered cockpit. His bearded face was speckled with blood, and he was waving around a sidearm as he slipped over his own heels.

"Taln'? That you?" The pilot called, even though he was only eight or so feet away.

"Yeah." Talner croaked and turned back to Kel, playing with some of her feathers in his fingers.

Shackie muttered something and Talner could hear his boots crunching through the stone and sand until the pilot was standing right over and behind him. Shackie collapsed to a kneel beside him and stared at the Kig-yar in his arms.

"So, uhhh…" He toyed with the bolt on his Magnum, his eyes scanning the sky. "-how was my flying?"

Talner's jaw quivered and he bunched a fist. He was just about to whirl around and deck Shackie when Kel suddenly wheezed, and her entire body tensed.

"_Kel._" He gasped, gripping both sides of her ridged beak.

Kel Yn Gor's fiery eyes shot open, wide, inquisitive, terrified. Her mouth gaped in a series of panicked pants, her chest now bobbing rapidly underneath her harness. Talner flexed his thumbs down her cheek-ridges to calm her down.

"You're okay." He repeated to her several times, fawning over her like an overwhelmed parent, adjusting her feathers, wiping soot and sand stains from her beak. A single drop of moisture fled down the Kig-yar's cheek, and Talner blinked as he witnessed some semblance of her crying for the first time since he had met her. He wiped that away too and sat her up until she was on her haunches. "Kel Yn Gor, c'mon, you're okay. You're good."

Kel grabbed his arms and squeezed until the padding squeaked under her fingers. Her breathing slowed and soon the two of them were staring at each other through the swirling dust.

"Hey, darlin'." Talner smirked silently.

"…I have decided that I hate flying." Kel croaked, and her feathers bristled. She swatted his hand when he made to adjust them.

"You birds can sure take a hit when you need to." Shackie chimed in over Talner's shoulder. Kel chattered at him angrily and hissed like a displeased lizard, making the pilot flinch and scramble back towards his ruined plane.

Panting, now with hate, Kel stood up and swept her snout around the crash site. She covered the distance to the bay with two bounding steps, and Talner grunted as his sniper rifle landed in his arms, and Kel returned checking the blamite count on the spine of her Needle rifle.

"Are you injured?" She muttered, staring at him.

"Bruised to hell." He shrugged, standing up and facing her. "I've had worse. I should be askin' _you. _Anything hurting?"

"Same as you." Kel avoided eye contact and stared at the sand.

"That's alright." Shackie chuckled, holding up his forearm. "Nobody ask me how I'm doing this fine morning." There was a strip of hull-plating the size of a water-bottle sticking from his flesh. It punched through the underside of his wrist and stabbed out the other side. It leaked blood that dripped from its lower, ragged half, in loosely patterned drops.

"Shit." Talner yanked a biofoam canister off his belt and knelt down to work on Shackie's limb. "Kel, gimme' a survey of the crash site, and tell me what you see. Sight the enemy."

Kel made a considering hum and shifted on her talons, her snout pointing up at the sky just ahead.

"Of course." She said. "Survey is complete."

"What?"

"Enemy sighted." She gestured with the barrel of her rifle. Talner finished packing the foam around the wound, and followed her gaze.

There was an eel-shaped mass rapidly approaching from over a few dune rises. The tell-tale howl of the Dromon's repulsors sang across the desert.

Talner grit his teeth and shoved Shackie to his feet, turning on Kel.

"Ya' think we're close enough for the boomer?" He asked.

The air thundered in a hollow, distant clap. The Dromon was just about to present its belly and chin right over their heads, when a flickering band of what resembled lightning shot out from the rear of their position.

The Gauss-shell slammed into the Dromon's nose, singeing and puncturing the reflective synthetic metal enwrapping its elegant snout. The ship's thrusters blared and it jolted backwards on its own fuselage mounting, soot and steam trailing from the damage wrought on its face.

"_Yeah! _Get 'em, Huan!" It was the nuts man, standing on a scorched ridge off to the Lifter's flank. He pumped a fist in the air, his other hand clenched around the collar of a wounded Kig-yar from the Lifter's bay. The alien held onto his human savior's flank for dear life and merely coughed with an expression of depression laced over his beak.

"Out of all people to survive a wreck, why did _that_ have to?" Kel pursed her mandible.

"We'll have to leg it back to the dig." Talner watched as the Dromon backed away from the crash site, its plasma turret struggling to get a bead on them over some dune ridges that divided it from the wreckage of the Lifter. "Use the Tower's boomer as cover. We should be able to make it."

"Are you out of your mind?" Shackie wiped his nose, again, sounding astoundingly unaffected by the situation going on around him, even with a foamed piece of scrap impaling his arm. "The Gauss will need to chew on that thing to take it out. It could easily just fly over here and spray us and retreat, just to get the kills in, once we're out in the open."

Another clap of miniature thunder, and the Dromon sank lower when a second shell smacked into its chin. There was a flash of blue light and licking flames. The entire group flinched when the wreckage of the ship's mangled plasma cannons slapped into the sand up ahead, still smoking.

"What a stroke of luck." Shackie said.

"Eat it, you vagina faces." Nut-man whooped. "So," He and the wounded Kig-yar hobbled down a slope towards them. "what's the plan?"

"We run like hell." Talner jabbed a thumb. "C'mon, I'll stay back and cover you."

"_We _will stay back and cover them." Kel corrected, bounding off to the crash site's flank before Talner could voice an objection. No sooner had that been said did the Dromon give off a new kind of sound.

Disarmed, the dropship lowered its stance whilst a third shell missed its sloping roof by just a few feet, and vanished off into the horizon. Twin rib-lodged mouths opened with wheezing hisses of hydraulic clamps and gravity nullifiers, spilling blue light from the vessel's interior.

Immensely tall, dark shapes fell heavily from the left side first, a total of three, and then two more from the opposite flank. Talner didn't need a close up view to know what they were.

"_Sangheili infantry._" Kel voxed through his helm link. "They are advancing towards the crash site."

"Count?" Talner watched as the sole three surviving crew hobbled around the Lifter behind him.

"_Eight._"

He growled under his breath and ran for the blast zone's crater ridge to take cover.

Over the howl of the wind, a distant, deep-throated command sounded faintly among the dunes. It was all that was said amongst the mostly silent warriors of R'ha. The first five were moving with startling foot-speed towards clusters of rocks and dune-ridges for cover at the edges of the crash site. Three more eight-foot-tall aliens garbed in crimson and yellow plate armor landed from the Dromon's interior and began to fan out behind their comrades. Talner picked out one armed with a Plasma Rifle before the alien ducked swiftly behind a large rock.

There was a chipping noise in the air, and a pink bolt lashed over the sand. One of the R'ha warriors dropped with a blamite crystal sticking from his forehead, his huge, muscle-wreathed body landing with a rough _thud_ in the sand.

Amazingly, the Sangheili twitched and actually started to get back up. Kel shot him again, this time, a shard passed right between both sets of his mandibles in the open-faced helmet. It hit the inside of his throat and burst a second later, spraying the ground behind his head with rich, purple blood.

Talner ducked as a bushel of plasma fire raked the ridge he was on, kicking up dust and sending pebbles everywhere. He checked the scope on his gun and popped up past the ridge, shoulder-level. He fired once and the round rook off a Sangheili's forearm. He could hear the warrior screaming over the wind as more plasma fire pinned him.

**_Phsskkk~! _**–a plasma bolt ripped off his left pauldron with a plastic-like, burn-sound of tearing. Talner grimaced as his skin was cooked underneath his flack jacket. It had been a solid, lucky hit. Today was evidently proving more and more to not be his day.

It was Primian all over again. At least back then he'd been standard equipped with the new marks of powered infantry armor that were capable of dealing with shots like that.

These Sangheili were home-brewed colonial soldiers, so they didn't have the benefits old-era Covenant infantry did. But he had to remember that he and Kel were handicapped too. Limited ammo and hand-me-down armor wouldn't suffice in a protracted firefight.

"Relocate." Talner grunted into his link, ignoring the pain, and sliding down the slope. Overhead, the Dromon dropship inched a little closer as it followed the advance of its infantry. The ship jowled as it turned on its flank, presenting one of the opened troop bays in the direction of its enemies.

A Sangheili wielding an antique Type-42 Plasma Cannon swiveled the gun to face down at the crash site, its size comically small in comparison to his larger, hunched-over gait. The alien's mandibles wriggled as he held down the trigger and sprayed the dune ridge with a piss-stream of blue plasma.

Talner just ducked behind the Lifter's cockpit as a blast of fire shattered the craft's glass right over his head. Metal screeched and dented. Shards of tiny glass rained about his lap, not from the cockpit but from bolts hitting the sand around his position and superheating it.

Kel bounded and jumped over the Lifter's tailfin. The two of them glanced across at each other and then rose as one with their rifles ready.

Talner's crosshair lined up with his quarry, and he fired. The Dromon's gunman kicked back, his claws reaching up to hold his head. Talner's bullet had eaten a fist-sized trench through the Sangheili's forehead that exited out the back of his neck. He died with magenta gore erupting from his face, his corpse tossing back into the troop compartment.

Kel's needle inflicted a loss too. Talner jumped in startlement when a Sangheili's body flopped uselessly on the dune that they had just vacated.

Before they could move, plasma fire raked the Lifter from several directions. Talner cursed and balled himself behind the cockpit as bolts hit the area around him like hail. He glanced up and saw a Sangheilian infantryman standing on the flank of another hill to his left. Talner fired from his lap and the alien rolled to take cover.

"We've been flanked." Kel croaked nearby. "Fall back!"

"I'm tryin-" Talner's speech left his throat when something hit him in the side of the head. By pure reaction, he ripped off his helmet and threw it out into the open space just past the Lifter. The plasma grenade stuck to it detonated a second later, blinding both sides of the fight temporarily in a brilliant corona of bright light.

He glanced over the wreckage at the hill ahead. It was the Sangheili whose arm he had shot off. The bastard was tough, evidently. His mandibles splayed in a bellowing cry, completely uncaring about the gore leaking from his stump as he ripped a Plasma Rifle from his belt and peppered Talner's hiding place.

"_Tower to Talner, get your ass back here!_" Susanne cried in his comms bead. "_Huan can't get a bead on the dropship, it's too low, and it's gun is gone, run for it!_"

Talner considered screaming at her to remind her about their alien infantry problem. But the backdrop of plasma rifles barking and the distant cries of very angry Sangheili were probably enough to inform Susanne, seeing as he never had closed the vox-link after she spoke.

"Go, I will keep you covered._" _Kel cried.

Talner sprinted across the open sand, pink needles flying right over his head as Kel pinned the blood-enraged warriors eagerly gunning for them, hoping to exact revenge on those who were now not only trespassers, but murderers of their kin.

* * *

{👾}


	6. Chapter 6

**Featherkisser **

**6**

* * *

Easa R'ha lit the end of the _ceeol_ stick and let it rest into a full burn. He flicked off the plasm-tip and laid it on the prayer matt beside him, waiting, as a tiny, green flame no bigger than his thumbprint began to dance on the top of the little spire.

The pleasant scent of the herb began to waft past his snout. It was fresh, and crisp, like the air of the Sulubann Mountains where the _ceeol_ plant was endemic to. Very quicky, it filled the majority of the chamber, blending with the deathly silence in perfect synchronicity.

Easa exhaled very slowly and let his eyes shut as he linked with the booming din of the temple. A bird of prey cried somewhere over the distant peaks, and its song echoed down several of the garden tributaries lining the meditation chamber's exterior. Caught in beams of shimmering, blue light from Ulasa's moon above, Easa did not even appear to have heard the slight disruption.

The open, stone skylight allowed the incense bowl to catch the moon's silvery tears in its center. The _ceeol_ stick, floating in the small bit of water erected itself silently for his judgment. Easa bent on his backward knees, until his forehead was almost touching the little flame. He began to murmur softly through his mandibles, finding a tranquil sort of brotherhood with the very darkness and the moonlight enveloping him.

The bowl was placed at the foot of a large shrine forged from silvery metal. Vines overgrow the shining arms of a Sangheilian warrior, posed as if striding from a recent victory, or towards a fresh fight. Skirted armor descended down his torso and hips. His arms were bare and scripted with the traditional tattoos ritualistically engraved in the flesh of all able-bodied men in his clan when they reached war-age. Looking at the statue made his limbs itch, as every single inch from his wrists to the tops of his collar bones was riddled with round reams of text depicting the clan's history and his childhood rearing. His father's crest had been ritualistically scarred across the hunched flat of his back, and his mother's across his stomach. Easa was the prime of what every R'ha warrior strove to ultimately be.

He was over eight feet tall, streamlined with impeccable muscles that wound beneath his gray, scaly skin like enwrapped chords of titanium, and he was a living book. His body could be read like the history scrolls kept in the Chambers of the Ancients. He had served in three major conflicts and was tactically brilliant. One day, when his own sons grew to be of war-age, his crest would be marked upon their backs too. They would inherit his lineage, and he had no doubt that they each would go on to do extraordinary things for the clan.

"_Mur'rootha R'ha._" He finished a cant in a hoarse whisper, leaning back and staring for a moment at the large champion's statue overlooking the temple's interior. The statue of Muroostho R'haee, the settler of Ulasa, their homeworld.

"It is on my watch that this transgression dishonors you, lord." Easa mumbled, his eyes slowly trailing down the statue's legs, until they fell on the little green flame of the _ceeol_ stick in the water bowl between his knees. "Let my solitude here act as testament to the disservice I have wrought. Blood will drown out the offense."

Easa's robes swept from under him as he stood. He tapped his two fingers against his tongue, and pinched the _ceeol'_s flame to a swift demise before striding from the temple.

It was only in tradition for a lord to undergo the Stance of Balance in times of failure. Easa's war record may have screamed of the opposite of such doings, but the news as of late had shaken him.

Whenever it was so that the dead may be desecrated, it could be taken as nothing more than bad omen.

* * *

{👾}

Easa crossed the beautiful flower gardens surrounding the temple's grassy hillside home. Through the moonlight alone could he see the spanning view of rice paddies extending far out into the Ulasaian countryside, intermittently speckled with cottages, barns and earth-homes, their windows like with dancing, green firelight.

His sandal-wears were quiet as they tapped down the stone steps. He was staring at his heels and clenched at his brow in the wake of his visit to the shrine.

In truth, Easa R'ha was exhausted. The hour was much unpleasant, and his fatigue was only held at bay by the immense floods of dreadful anger welling in his gut.

That statue was but a scion to what was going on two star systems away to the galactic north, not far from the R'ha agriworld of Baramuse. The tombs far beneath the surface of the desert world known to his people as the Darken Cleft had been breached, and now, the very burial transport of Teha R'ha- an elder who had recently passed through his Night of Death –was communicating reports of engaging hostile ground and air assets.

The ranks of this desecrating faction were reportedly staffed by Kig-yar and _humans._

Easa R'ha had no specific qualms with the latter, but that did not mean it made them worthy to traverse the hallowed graves of his ancestors.

"_Kaidon._" One of the gate sentries was standing in the center of the path exiting the temple's grounds. The shorter Sangheili's tabard was kicking in the cool night wind as he bowed to his lord. "Preparations are complete."

"Is there more?" Easa's voice was a feral growl. Some had jokingly compared his throat to the guttural gruffness of the Jiralhanae.

"Lord Soyljuk, sir." The sentry stepped aside and revealed a second figure on the misty road. Easa's mandibles creaked into a slight grin as the hunched, massive form of Soyljuk closed the distance meekly, and bowed to his Kaidon.

"I'm coming with you." The old man croaked without even addressing his title. Easa laughed at him, loudly, making the sentry twitch.

"Of course you are." The Kaidon said. "But not while you're wearing _that._" He gestured to the robes and hood adorning the elder's massive body. Soyljuk grinned and clucked his mandibles in agreement.

"I knew you would not deny me this." He muttered.

"It would not be my place to." Easa waved the sentry off with a respectful nod, and fell into step with his old friend on the road. "You garnered a sentry for your passage through a few family farms?"

"They treat me like a wandering head of cattle at the Keep." Soyljuk huffed. "The younglings gather around my knees, asking for tales, and even advice, like I am their birth-uncle."

"Whelps can see what their eldest sometimes cannot." Easa wisely reminded, folding his claws behind his back. "If there is a light in the eyes of a true one of passion, children and potential wives are usually the first to see it. Generals see it usually too late for it to matter for them anymore."

"…Were you undergoing the Ritual of Balance? Inside the temple?" Soyljuk looked at him.

"Yes I was."

"But you have not sinned, Kaidon."

"But I have. Our dead are being rifled through as you and I speak. The R'ha have kept alive a _Carakian _tradition that even the fathers of Sangheilios herself have failed to maintain.

The rightful placement of those lost shedding their blood for their homeland. What shame have I brought upon the clan as being the first to let that divine perfection slip through my fingers?" Easa grumbled. "It is a mockery of everything we stand for. No less committed by the hands of lowly _criminals._"

"If humor would serve you," Soyljuk attempted a mandible grin. "Teha always did wish to meet his end taking retribution to our enemies. He can afford that now."

Easa half growled as he chuckled. He wasn't sure whether to find it funny or horrific.

The winding road ended in a large courtyard at the foot of the Keep of Aral. The spanning series of old stone spires loomed just beneath the chin of the moon to the north, blackened, highlighted at their edges with blades of blue and silver.

Ten Dromon-class Dropships were hovering over the courtyard, and warriors were filing into them in organized trios and pairs. The night sky whooshed audibly as a Tarasque heavy-fighter swept over the landing site and rose as a black dagger into the stars, stationing in orbit to escort the warband alongside the _Immaculate Host,_ a Man-O-War waiting to deploy the brigade and bring retribution to the grave-robbers on Darken Cleft.

"I will erase this stain entirely." Easa stated as he and the elder passed through a few sentries who stood aside for them. Laborers rushed past every now and again carrying weapons, pieces of armor and pull-carriages. "I demand the trespassers be made as an example. We shall hang them from their ankles and gut them, decorating our forefather's tombs with their eternal vigils."

"May I remind you, Kaidon," Soyljuk risked. "you have not _sinned._"

"Don your mantle, elder." Easa dismissed, trudging towards one of the Dromons. "We will spill blood yet."

"Before you get onto that ship, Kaidon," The old Sangheili's voice etched through the night, making Easa slowly turn and study him. "Jeiel would not let me leave without telling you to go to her. Before our departure."

Easa's shoulders rose and fell, and his deepened sign likened itself to the hissing embers of a volcanic crater's depression.

"See your wife, sir." Soyljuk gave another of his mandible grins. "And I beg that of you. My niece is not one for being left behind."

* * *

{👾}

Most of the Keep was as still as a crypt. The comparison, unfortunately, roused Easa's temper.

_Damn the Gods,_ many would have said. But Easa did not see much of a point or merit in that proclamation. He had not sacrificed his very skin to the pages of history just to undo his own teachings.

Potted flowers hung from squeaking chains along window sills. Oil-fed lanterns flickered in the dead of night, and candles were still burning in many studies and bedroom lofts. Tonight was a strange night, in that the inhabitants of the Keep were caught between a vital hour of sleep, and yet an entire detachment of able-bodied men was being sent into the stars.

Easa walked the crowded streets of his home alone. He spotted some of his own citizens, peering out of windows, gazing from cracked doorframes, their features highlighted green from their home's sconces. Each one of them whose eyes he met immediately planted their pupils to their own hooves. Men bowed, women lowered their necks, children stared with fascination at the towering warrior they had heard mentioned in the Common Rooms at the Keep's very heart. The latest descendent of their ruling caste. Even through the robes, could they see how powerful he was.

Easa was at least humble in that regard. He liked to remember that Jeiel had come to him not because of his own flaunting, but because he had worked long and hard to convince her of his own good intentions. It would never have happened if she wasn't the niece to his best friend, and one of the more respected elders of the state.

The sentries at the gates to the R'ha Spire let him through, and up the regally carpeted steps he trudged, through story after story of chambers lavished with tapestries, interior gardens and wide murals made from paint and colored cobble. Sangheilian anatomy had been captured by the ancient R'ha artisans in painful detail to make the spire's innards. There was not a statue here that did not suffer brisk contrast and fleshly realism.

To the quaint doors of the Royal Ward, and through there to the quiet expanse of the Kaidon's Chambers, the Library of Ak'Thoona, and finally, one last, wooden frame.

Easa paused before he entered his chambers. Inside, he could hear the crackle of torchlight, but he could _feel_ the presence of another. She was like air in that room to him, living, breathing air. Pure, unlike so many of his men.

"Jeiel?" Easa nudged the door open and stood in the archway. His eyes met those of his wife, who was standing blankly over the Kaidon's desk, her eyes a blooded crimson to compete against his emerald green. "You summoned me."

"Would you have come here if I had not?" Jeiel stung him, despite the innocence in her raspy tone. The Sangheilian woman stepped forth, her evening, translucent robes clinging greedily to the curve of her form in the torchlit dark. She was radiant, even with the slight touch of weathering that aged her jawline and brow. Easa had to quell a plumage developing in his breast as he stepped into the room.

"The night is yet young, and for where I am going, I did not fear the propensity of losing a moment of time with you." He hummed. "I hunt _rodents,_ my wife. Desecrating rodents who have spit upon our name. I will crush them and return to you."

"A battle is a battle." Jeiel crossed the distance between them, and Ease craned his saurian neck lower, allowing her to merge their foreheads. He was over a foot taller than her, his shoulders dwarfing hers. Jeiel was always peculiar in these situations. She ran her claws down his bulbous arms, reading the stories chiseled into his skin with her fingertips. "A husband may not come back, or a son may be lost."

"I _will_ come back." He soothed, his mandibles pursing as he placed a delicate kiss upon her brow. "_Mur'rootha R'ha,_ my wife. Our people's strength is with me."

"I am weary of your foe." Jeiel admitted, digging her fingers into his biceps. "What evil digs up the dead? I feel wrong about this. I heard the reports myself. You go against humans with formidable weaponry."

"Of limited number." He jeered. "Fear not, I say. This will be a scalpel's kill. A stab to a small and insignificant heart."

"…All I request is that you be careful." She sighed. "All I request is that you do not… you…"

Easa thundered a deep laugh and stroked her shoulders.

"You should not worry." He bobbed his snout at her. "Your lunatic uncle will be there to watch my back. No human could escape his sense of smell, much less a disgusting Kig-yar. I promise you, by tomorrow's morning, I shall bring you a polished, cleaned, human skull. One for our chambers. I will put it on my desk and present it to you as _us'thaa,_ Jeiel; a second request of your hand."

"_Easa~._" Jeiel fluttered, pushing against his broad chest as she bit into her thumb. "It is too long into our lives to relive such times."

"It is never too long." He kissed her forehead again. "A human skull. I will bring you a human skull, my love."

* * *

{👾}


	7. Chapter 7

**Featherkisser**

**7**

* * *

**_Clung~! _**–went the plasma drum, like a thickened gong rapping off a solid plate of titanium. A Gauss-shell had passed right over the _Eschell_ and had rattled the entire interior. One of the potentially explosive plasma tanks had literally teetered and had fallen onto the deck.

Taptap gave a shrill noise and scurried over, shoving the tank back into the corner he had stood it up in. The sleeve indicators lining the drum's top-lid flanks were pulsing a consistent yellow as the contents inside were jostled. Taptap may have been dumber than a stump, but even he knew that if the tanks started to pulsate _red_ than the ore-plasma was in danger of exploding.

After what had just happened down below in the trench, that was the _last_ thing the little Unggoy wanted.

Taptap was frantic, and he used the chaos around Tower defense as a cover for what he was doing. There was now a small band of humans and Kig-yar from Kuhaga's group who had gathered to start filling the other _Eschell_ schooner and the Phantom. They were under the false pretense that Taptap had stuffed the first ship full of the shared loot already.

_For all Taptap know, they be right!_

The Grunt was squeezing through the tens of drums he'd spent all morning shoving into the small schooner's cargo bay and nets. He was just wedging through a trio of drums when he stopped and began to quiver.

The explosion. What if Yamva was _dead? _How did that fit into the plan? He was a goner if that happened!

Taptap whined like a terrified dog and dug through the drums, coming out the other side of the gap with a panicked squawk as he tripped over his heels and slammed onto the deck. He held his chitinous paws over his head and pressed his mask into the grate mesh plate. The _Eschell_'s hull groaned around him as something rattled the air outside.

Part of him was beyond terrified. Yamva may have been… _cruel_ in his methods of mentorship (at least, in Taptap's standards) –but nobody else on this dig even registered his bloody existence. The humans would probably leave him behind, and the Kig-yar might-

...Taptap swallowed.

He may never have seen the fullest extent of the Covenant, but he had heard the stories of what Kig-yar did to prisoners during the war.

Despite that fear, Taptap truly didn't know how to handle Yamva potentially being dead. Yamva was a source of elation for his tiny little mind, and, seeing as Taptap was a member of a race that had been genetically ruined to a predisposition of _expecting _cruel treatment on principle, Yamva's abuse wasn't so much a crime to him as it was normalized behavior.

Did Taptap like it when the Kig-yar kicked him? And called him names? And told him that his nipple-mother had defecated him out instead of proper birthing? No. Of course not. Taptap had the intelligence of a doornail, but he still had feelings.

The Grunt controlled his breathing and gingerly rose from the deck. Sunlight beamed through the _Eschell'_s ajar rib-hatch and bathed the beginnings of the drum-stacked cargo chamber with blinding white. Cargo net meshes swayed from the ceiling racks, filled to their brims with miniature plasma cans and cell blocks.

He supposed that if Yamva croaked, _he_ could steal the ore-plasma. Taptap had… _limited _experience with the human schooner transports.

He could figure it out.

The light filtering in from outside became halved by something tall standing in the bulkhead's frame.

Taptap looked up at the source of the shadow, and squealed in a mixture of fright and joy.

"_Yamva~! _You alive!" The Grunt clapped his meaty paws and waddled over. "Taptap do good on order. Stock whole ship with drums for us. We take off soon, just like plan, righ-"

Taptap realized the wild look in the engineer's eyes too late.

**_Thwack~!_**

-The Unggoy flew back and sprawled on the spine of his tank back to the deck, his eyes locked on Yamva with shocked stupor. The Kig-yar had kicked him in the stomach.

"You blundering, floundering, senseless and nugatory little bastard." Yamva squawked, stomping over the grate mesh with such force that each step shook the little schooner. Taptap shrieked and started to scrambled backward, grinding his tank against the metal. "You broke it."

"_What-?! Me break what?!_" Taptap hollered.

Yamva pinned the alien under his cloven heel, leaning down to snarl in his assistant's face with all of his razor-sharp, saurian teeth.

"_Our impromptu bomb._" Yamva clarified in a feral snarl. He ripped the plasma pistol off his belt and jammed the searing, hot prongs of its barrel right between Taptap's eyes. All screaming and flailing from the Unggoy stopped immediately. "You almost killed me."

"T-Taptap not know what talking about." The Grunt mumbled.

"Your _drum._" Yamva pointed the gun drunkenly at the barrel that Taptap had fixed earlier, off in the corner. The Kig-yar's eyes were bigger than platters, his nostrils flared and a terrible, salty smell was rising from his skin as his pheromones flared. "You broke one of my nodes. A delicate, delicate device that is not meant to be thrown around when it is installed inside a feed-port _pumping flammable substances._"

"Taptap not notice."

Yamva cawed like a crow. It was a cackle.

"Who knows how many people are dead because of you. And all you can muster is _that you did not notice?_" He asked manically. Without knowing what else to do, the Unggoy nodded very slowly.

"-T-Taptap thought you hate humans… and own kind-"

"I was not asking out of _concern,_ you stupid little piece of shit." Yamva stamped on Taptap's breast, making the alien wheeze. "If I was smart, I'd have used you to kill people more often, seeing as death is something so grand, your tiny brain cannot understand its depth."

Taptap didn't respond either because he hadn't understood half of what Yamva had said, or he was too afraid. Eventually, the latter answered the Grunt's unasked question.

"They have not seen me." Yamva shivered all over, like the sentence had been euphoric for him to say. "We are out of time, because of _you._"

The _Eschell _rocked again, and contractors were screaming outside. Yamva could faintly make out some of what his fellows were saying. The Kig-yar clenched his fangs and growled.

_R'ha._

Then, the Sangheili knew. He supposed that in hindsight, Taptap's idiocy was just an acceleration to something already doomed.

Yamva flexed his bladed toes on Taptap's chest. He appraised the inside of the schooner with a few sweeps, seeing it filled with enough ore-plasma to make any one Kig-yar a decent fortune.

Whether it went to the Confederates, merc's, the Neo Covenant, it did not matter. Hell, Yamva would've sold this bounty to the _UNSC _if speed was an unspoken part of the payment.

"I will ready the engine drive." He glowered. "Pick yourself up and prepare to leave."

Taptap heaved as the engineer stepped off of him and began to trot towards the cockpit. Looking up from the floor, he rubbed tenderly at his chitinous stomach.

"Y-Yamva?"

Yamva stopped in the bulkhead to the controls.

"N-Not stock on methane." Taptap poked his mask, indicating a meter that only he could see, showing his tank was down less than half. "Need spares."

"You _left_ them down there." Yamva stated with a grim beak-smile.

"Piled outside." Taptap pointed at the arch frame to the chaos outside. "Right outside."

"Run."

Taptap scrambled to his stubby little feet and hoofed it out the bay. Yamva snorted and swept into the cockpit, chattering in discomfort as he shoved himself into one of the two human-built chairs. He clicked the proper controls and yanked back on a lever. The _Eschell_ crooned as its life support came online, and the engines started to light. The whole bay sifted a bit as the ship levitated a foot off the sand beneath it.

Yamva hovered a claw over the sealant button that would take in the schooner's loading ramp and shut the shutters to the outside. He gazed around the chair's spine and waited.

_Why am I doing this for that destructive rodent?_

His jaw went a little slack, and he started to drool. If he took off now, Taptap would be left behind with everyone else. He'd be left behind with that backstabbing tyrant, Kuhaga, that murderous psychopath, Tollen, that freak sniper, Talner and-

-and Kel Yn Gor.

Part of Yamva shuddered and shriveled in defeat.

Kel Yn Gor had been part of his plan, and now he realized that he would probably never be able to lay eyes on her again. His mate had been Ruuhtian, as he, but for some reason, the foreign plumage of the _T'vao _had fed into a sort of carnal desire in the engineer's person.

R'ha would most likely kill everyone here. So, he supposed there was some victory in that. At least, if he couldn't have the female than no one could, _especially_ that damnable human Kel had that fascination with. Such things were crimes against nature, and he could smell that partnership across an entire warband.

"Taptap back!" The Grunt careened through the open shutters on all hours, a pair of roped-up spare tanks jostling and clanking under his arm. "It really bad out there!"

"They all run in circles I know." Yamva called back, slapping the button and watching as the interior of the _Eschell_ came to rely entirely on the light fixtures overhead. He keyed the cockpit panes and light caused him to blink as the glass' shutters folded upwards to reveal the digsite to him. "None of that matters now."

"Not just that, look!" Taptap gripped Yamva's chair and pointed a fat claw past the Kig-yar's beak. "Old People are here too!"

Yamva's heart sank into his chest.

Gradually growing in the desert sky above was a medusozoan shape, with protrusions that could only mimic the _Carakian_ style of a race that had first sported its like thousands of years before the Covenant.

It was a Sangheilian Man-O-War, lowering itself through Tg-66's atmosphere with shocking speed. Every second was it getting bigger. He and Taptap were trapped.

* * *

{👾}

Talner slid one of his last magazines into his rifle and shouldered it.

**_Bang~! _**–the brass screamed in his ears. A Sangheili rounding a dune lost half his face and tossed into the sand.

"_Relocating._" Kel croaked in the auxiliary link in his uniform's collar.

"Coverin'." He grunted.

Up ahead, Kel was a dark flitter of movement. She ran so fast that her feathers were a blur behind her. The T'vaoan's legs were like those of a raptor, arching and swinging past one another with phantasmal agility. Talner had to force himself not to become distracted. He fired again and an R'ha warrior ducked behind cover right as he made to fire on Kel's flank.

Kel Yn Gor leaped off her cloven heels at the last minute. Talner ducked as if an artillery round was sailing overhead. She cleared a span of fifteen feet in the single jump and landed with a scrabble of dust right beside him.

"Don't pull a hamstring or nothin'." He muttered, slipping his gun's stocks down and sliding it to its mag-holster over his back.

"What is a _ham-string?_" Kel quirked an eye at him and loosed off a cluster of pot-shots all in one movement. Plasma raked the rocks they were behind and she ducked right as a few bolts slipped over her head feathers.

Talner ignored her and glanced over the stone. The Dromon dropship had pulled back, and he could vaguely make out the top of the ship's spine over a few hills to the north. With its chin-gun blown off and its troop complement expended, the pilot could do little else but shelter his craft from Huan's Gauss-gun back at the Tower site.

Still, two Sangheilian infantrymen were doggedly pursuing them every inch back towards the dig. One of them had a carbine, and he wasn't half a bad shot.

Talner flinched when a green bolt vaporized the stone literally right in front of his face. He coughed and batted at heated pebbles eating into his cheeks.

"Sumnabitch' if I ain't getting pinned by some hinge-head." He grumbled, ripping off his sidearm, a _Vesor _Stut-Pistol, and yanking the pin back. "How's your ammo?"

Kel looked down at the minuscule and final little spire of blamite protruding from her rifle's spine. She rolled her amber eyes- a human gesture –and shook her head at him.

"Welp'," He smiled at here, still ignoring the steam wafting off the shoulder he'd been shot in. "good thing there's only two of them, huh?"

A gradual roar descending in the sky caught their attention. Talner and Kel stared grimly at the large jellyfish-looking ship breaking through the upper atmosphere with a slight, amber glow.

A Sangheilian Man-O-War. Colored crimson and yellow in the colors of R'ha. A spreading cluster of smaller craft were breaking away from a dorsal bay on the ship's belly.

"Shit on a stick, that was bad timing." Talner swallowed.

Kel gripped his arm. Talner tore his eyes off the spectacle above and looked at her.

"Run away with me." Kel Yn Gor said, and Talner blinked. "_Now_."

The Helljumper had made tough decisions before, decisions _way_ tougher than anything like this. But for some reason he hesitated, even if it wasn't for long, he still did.

He glanced once over the rocks, back at the sky, and back towards the dig. Then, he looked at Kel again, and immediately became lost in her amber eyes. Her feathers were bloomed and quivering, just like they had been in that lucra-bar on the space-habitat.

"Alright." Talner said, his mouth going dry.

* * *

{👾}

The lift screamed as Kuhaga and Tollen reached the topsite Tower. Most of Kuhaga's crew were here, a small detachment still hanging out below and rounding up the last barrels of ore-plasma. Tollen had assembled his mercs into a kill team and was preparing to spread out around the landing site to try and hold off any beachhead attempts, several of them armed with standard-issue Rocket Launchers that they had purchased in an arms-deal a few weeks before coming to Tg-66.

They were helpless against the Man-O-War. Nothing they possessed would allow them to go toe-to-toe with a capital ship, even of such small size. But Kuhaga knew the Sangheili would refrain from using orbital weapons, lest they destroy their own tombs that they were so obsessive over in the trench below.

Fully uniformed and wielding a DMR rifle, Kuhaga nodded for Tollen and pointed at the _Eschell_s and the Phantom landed nearby.

"You'll join us on the Phantom. Leave the heavy gear, take the plasma and pull out. This is going to turn into a sweeping run." He said. "I.E, Tollen; you're gonna' have to jump on that ship as it's going over your head."

"I've been through worse, lad." Tollen snorted, shouldering an Assault Rifle, and leaving a pair of _Vesor_ pistols on his belt. "Besides, it gives me a while to indulge in my true passion; killing alien bastards."

Huan was still at the controls for the Gauss-gun. The little tech-man was hauling the pedals to bring the gun to bear at the encroaching swarm of ships coming down from the Man-O-War.

"-_Eleven contacts~!_" Susanne hollered from the flap of the Tower tent right beside him. "Dropships incoming, and a fighter!"

_We're dead,_ Kuhaga realized. But, dead or not, they had to try. He wasn't about to sit down and let some Elites do him in without a fight.

"Susanne, Chelsea, ditch the equipment and get in the schooners, prepare for takeoff." Kuhaga pointed. "Liop, Grak, one of you get in the Phantom and lift her off the grav-lock. We are leaving _and_ shooting."

"_Contact~!_" One of Tollen's men shouted nearby.

"_Lookout~!_"

Kuhaga ducked when a shadow slipped over the entire Tower area. A fat, bulbous craft riding trails of ghostly blue energy swept over the crags and dunes in an instant. A blast of plasma seared outwards from its belly like an incoming meteor, and Huan and the Gauss-gun platform vanished in a climbing pylon of purple and orange fire. The report was deafening, and chunks of scorched earth rained hellishly on all of their positions. Nobody was asking if Huan was dead. Everyone knew that answer.

"_Tarasque._" Tollen spat. Kuhaga watched as the tail-end of the heavy-fighter vanished over the other side of the Crag Belt. "Eyes-up, boys, dropships are here to play!"

Kuhaga unpinned his DMR and knelt behind a boulder. The air was overwhelmed with the reverberating cacophony of a small fleet of repulsorcraft circling their position like buzzards.

Dromon dropships, around ten of them. Tollen's men ducked into cover as plasma began to spray the rocks they were hidden behind. Rockets arched out and smashed into the dropship's chins, shattering several of their guns and damaging their cockpits.

The Phantom hovering nearby groaned as soon as two Kig-yar- the bickering pair, named Grak and Liop –were swept up into its anti-grav chute on the belly. The cannon on its chin started belching pulse-shots at one of the Dromons, raking its alien ribs and chin with blasts of pink and crimson fire.

Death screams hollered out as Tollen's group took losses. Kuhaga saw Tollen himself rising out of a crag cluster, RPG over his shoulder. The entire left side of his body kicked and the missile struck out into the sky, striking an already damaged Dromon in its opened troop bay compartment. The dropship whined shrilly for a second, and the air itself shifted as it vanished in a colossal burst of light and falling shrapnel, distended, Sangheilian corpses flipping through the air in burnt crisps like ragdolls.

One of the Dromons swept right over the Tower tent, and its troop bays belched open. Kuhaga rose as an eight-foot-tall behemoth landed in a kneel just ahead of his boulder. The R'ha Sangheili rose, garbed in crimson and yellow nonstandard plating.

Kuhaga saw its green eyes widen in surprise before his DMR kicked and he riddled its powerful chest with four rounds. The Sangheili staggered and crumpled, purple gore misting from its breast.

Another alien landed right beside Kuhaga's boulder and bellowed at him in an impossibly deep voice. A two-handed Plasma Repeater in its claws screamed and Kuhaga's cried out as his protective plating minimized a pair of bolts that hit him in the chest.

He fell on his backside and fire three times. One round bounced off the Sangheili's helmet, the other went in and out of its throat, and the last punched through its eye. The body fell forward and collapsed on top of him painfully, pinning him beneath Sangheili cadaver, and sand.

Kuhaga cried out in defiance as he struggled to push the immense corpse off of himself. Then, more boots thudded into the dirt nearby. The Dromon veered off course as a rocket smashed into its ribs, ripping great rends of alien metal off its flaming fuselage.

Two more Sangheili stood over him, sneering. One raised a plasma rifle, and Kuhaga knew he was about to die.

**_Plskkk~! _**–the alien's head exploded in a fountain of purple blood, casting chunks of brain matter in every direction. Its fellow spun around and then dropped when a pink, glowing needle stabbed into its snout. It burst like a tiny grenade and vaporized the Sangheili's nose and an eye as he fell.

_Talner,_ Kuhaga figured with a terrified huff, still trying to wedge himself out from under the corpse. _And he's still got that fucking bird with him._

* * *

{👾}

As soon as Chelsea vanished inside the first _Eschell,_ Susanne made for the second. She didn't even notice it hovering off the ground slightly as she sprinted for its loading bay.

Her mind was on overdrive as she hugged the Stut-Rifle to her chest. A Dromon passed right overhead and sprayed the ground she was running across with plasma. Susanne shrieked as some of the heavy bolts singed her hair and missed her by inches.

_Runrunrunrunrun-_ her brain screamed.

The shutters meant to seal off the _Eschell's_ cargo bay were beginning to rise. Susanne was too panic-stricken to get into cover to wonder who was already operating the ship.

Right as the bay finished sucking into the rib compartment did she leap off her boots, and sail right through the last gap in the rising shutters.

**_Clang~! _**–she landed on her belly across the deck inside, groaning in exhaustion and pain. The firefight outside continued to rage, now muffled, and the whole schooner shook as a passing Dromon raked its exterior hull with plasma sprays, trying to bring it down.

"-_Who the hell is up there?_" Susanne coughed, rising to her knees and staring ahead at the little bulkhead for the cockpit.

"_Look!_" –She heard a shrill voice inside, and her eyes adjusted to show her the little, triangular-tanked back of… a _Grunt?_ "Old People are back!"

"What the fuck?" Susanne blubbered.

The little alien froze, and slowly turned around to face her, its eyes just over its rebreather mask wide and unbelieving.

As soon as Taptap made eye-contact with the confused contractor, he let out a feminine screech, emitting a clang of metal-to-metal as he tossed himself back into a corner of the cockpit and pointed at her in terror.

Engineer Yamva's ugly snout pistoned around the spine of the pilot's chair, and as the realization set in for Susanne, she scrambled for her Stut-Rifle that was splayed across her lap.

Yamva arched his plasma pistol between the pilot chairs and shot her in the face.

* * *

{👾}

Easa waited until the troop bay lowered, hanging onto the roof-slip over his helmed head for balance. The Dromon was jolted several times as the pilot navigated around rockets and gunfire. The whole hold shuddered under the duress of a massive, exterior explosion.

"_We have lost another._" –Came the growling answer through Easa's communications uplink. He snarled underneath the yellow guards protecting his mandibles. Easa remembered his wife's concerns and scoffed at how true they were turning out to be.

_It will not stop me from getting that skull. Or twenty._

"You look good." Soyljuk said beside him, the old warrior staring at him through the center eye-diode making the heart of his stealth suit. The black and red plating covering Soyljuk would grant him the benefits of stealth, where Easa's golden and yellow Kaidon armor would protect him with inwreathing energy shields, a rare gift for those who had never benefitted from the Old Hegemony.

"You will take their flank." Easa inclined his snout. "Target their heavy weapons teams and pull their fire from the sky."

"As you wish, Kaidon." Soyljuk bowed and glanced at the back of the bay. Eight other Sangheili warriors stood behind their Kaidon as his personal guard. They were silent in the darkly lit space of the Dromon. The hull shuddered again. "_Disembark! Mur'rootha R'ha, brothers._"

The soldiers echoed the call and light flooded into the bay. Darken Cleft's sandy surface was revealed on an angle. It was chaos around a small field the enemy fighters had set up as a landing zone. A pair of drab-colored, human transports struggled to rise from the ground. A Covenant-era Phantom resisted the Dromons circling and peppering it with plasma fire that was incapable of puncturing its hull. Dead humans, dead Kig-yar and dead Sangheili were speckled lightly about the zone as R'ha infantry dropped from their vessels and engaged ground teams wielding DMRs, Magnums and Rocket Launchers.

Easa snarled and clenched a large hilt magnetized to his belt. He unsheathed his Energy Sword and bathed himself and his fellows in glowing white light as the weapon sparked to life. In his other claw he brandished a Plasma Rifle, rolling his shoulders in anticipation.

"I can feel your eagerness in the air, brother." He smirked when Soyljuk's tense form bundled underneath his stealth armor. "You have point."

The old man jumped out of the bay first and immediately, his physical form wavered and vanished before he hit the ground. Easa could faintly see a pair of hoof-prints materialize in the dirt, before Soyljuk's movements became untraceable.

He nodded at his men a second later and jumped himself, landing in the center of the fight with a rupturing report of synthetic metal from his boots.

Today, he would consecrate this hallowed earth with human and Kig-yar blood.

* * *

{👾}

Talner and Kel merged into the firefight from the south, Talner taking cover behind a few crates, and Kel finding a perch atop a nearby basalt stack.

He could see Kuhaga from where he had erroneously decided to save him. He was pinned under one of the Sangheili corpses still, buried in the bodies. Tollen's entire band was dedicated to fighting off the dropships and Kuhaga's remaining contractors were wrapped up with the infantry, and they were losing.

"_The phantom is active._" Kel voxed, and Talner could see the dropship swiveling around madly, trading shots with Dromons that pack-attacked it like a drove of cooperating sharks. If the Phantom crashed, and the _Eschells_ were destroyed, then they were dead. "Do we take a schooner?"

"We're goin' for the Phantom." Talner said, ripping out his sniper rifle again.

"_You _are_ insane._"

"It has the armor to get us out of here in one piece." He focused on the nearest cluster of R'ha infantry. Ten Elites, taking cover near the _Eschells,_ their backs to his and her positions. He aimed at one of the rearguards and pulled the trigger.

**_Bang~! _**–the back of the Sangheili's head popped like a cist. He collapsed.

**_Crack~! _**–Needles from Kel speckled the back of another. The Sangheili screamed as he fell to his knees, and the combined crystal-cluster exploded with the errant force of a grenade, wounding and slaughtering half the squad. Talner lowered his gun and looked over at the basalt towers. He could swear Kel was peaking over the rocks right at him, grinning with her bird-muzzle like a proud, small child.

"_I'm out of ammunition._" She clarified, sounding shy.

"I noticed, darlin'." The rifle bucked again. A Sangheili leaping from the bay of a Dromon flipped head over heels as the round caught him in the throat mid-drop. "We gotta' move."

Talner advanced towards the _Eschells,_ rolling when a passing Dromon took a strafing shot at him. The plasma ate the sand around him and vaporized the caps of a few sealant crates.

"_How are we supposed to penetrate this mess? There is so much gunfire, that we might as well sprint into a wall._" Kel croaked.

"See if you can flank around to my zone, it's calmer over here." Talner voxed. "Tollen's men are doing a number on those dropships."

A pair of Kig-yar contractors just ahead of him twisted in odd directions as plasma fire raked their exposed bodies. No sooner had they crumpled did a Sangheili round a crate pile, see Talner and yank the trigger on his repeater rifle.

Talner barked as a bolt caught him in the chest and he went to ground behind some empty ore barrels. He rolled on his ribs and took out his Stut-Pistol, the _Veson_ kicking as he drained the mag past one of the barrel's bases.

The Sangheili absorbed the fire and ducked behind a boulder, peering once over as he let his repeater cool, and Talner changed his magazines.

"_Talner, are you injured?_" Kel's voice frantically came through his vox.

"Not down an' out, but _hell does that sting~!_" Talner screamed, clenching his teeth as steam rose from the impact point on his blast vest. "_Damn it!_"

"_I'm coming to you._"

"_No! _Stay in cover, don't-" It was useless, he could already see Kel using her wicked speed to sprint over to where he was. Plasma fire whipped around the T'vaoan as her legs pumped and swept under her. She was running so fast that even the dropships couldn't get a bead on her. From one end of the fight to the other. No one else here, not even the other Kig-yar, could've pulled it off.

Kel's beak hissed a single derogatory term in her own tongue. She was holding a new gun, a plasma rifle that she'd ripped off the body of an enemy. She drained the charge at the Sangheili ahead and shrieked in reptilian pleasure when the warrior collapsed screaming.

Response fire whipped out. Talner felt like screaming himself when a carbine bolt jerked Kel's arm to the west. Some of her beautiful feathers were scorched to black stumps as a plasma ball passed an inch over her brow.

The barrels they hid behind tumbled. Kel flew to the south, airborne, and Talner rolled across the dirt. A Sangheili wielding dual energy swords cried out barbarically as he shouldered through and bulldozed their position.

"_Talner!_" Kel sounded very distant to him, so Talner silenced the blood pounding in his ears and brought up his pistol. He vaulted off his boots as one of the blades ran through the earth his stomach had been over a second earlier. He drained the feed in a series of magazine-depleting jolts of his finger. The Sangheili jerked and twisted, bullets that didn't bounce off his plating ripping through his breast, collar and shoulder. He abandoned the first sword and came at Talner brandishing the other one over his head, still hollering out a warcry of deafening volume.

Kel returned on her wicked legs. She mounted the Sangheili's massive shoulders and used her rifle like a club, batting him over the head twice, the second strike dislodging his helmet, where it skittered across the sand nearby.

Talner jumped to his feet and slipped a carved-grip trench knife from the ankle tether of his boot. He sliced open the Sangheili's ankle, ducked between its great legs and scythed horizontally through the vulnerable joint of its other calf.

The alien's cries and barks were lost on the two as they gradually cut and beat him to death. Kel hooked her heels into the back of his harness and drained his rifle's reserves right into the Sangheili's head. Plasma splashed and flesh crackled. Talner tossed himself to the side as the eight-foot-tall corpse fell to its knees and crumpled.

"_Talner~!_"

The ex-ODST gathered his breath and stared over his foe's cadaver, thinking it was Kel who was still calling him.

It wasn't. It was Kuhaga, just crawling out from under the dead Elite nearby.

"_Talner~!_" Kuhaga barked, reaching for his DMR.

For a moment, the two men stared at one another over half of the Tower area. There was an unspoken exchange of knowledge between them. Kuhaga's face became very blank, and Talner set his brow in a pained grimace.

"C'mon." He grabbed Kel as she crawled away from the dead Sangheili.

**_Plssskkk~! _**–Talner opened his mouth, and an ear-piercing holler leaped through his teeth. He looked down. The flickering blade of an energy dagger was protruding through his bicep.

Kel squawked something unintelligible. Something invisible hit her across the face and she spun like a top in the air, landing atop the corpse of the Elite they had killed.

Hooked like a fish on a line, Talner screamed again as he yanked his arm forwards and slid himself off the dagger. He spun on his heel and slashed with his knife, catching his assailant across the chest.

The blade kicked sparks as it harmlessly slid down and off a black and red breastplate. The stealth field nullifying the Sangheili's visage faded. Talner was face to face with a black assassin with a single, vision-diode glowering at him in the ornate helmet's face.

Talner staggered back as the dagger swept just before his throat, the Sangheili grunting with effort. He fell onto his back, his hand dancing across his belt. He produced another blade, and presented its tip upwards at the alien.

The Helljumper clicked a release on the handle, and the projectile blade shot out and impaled into the center of the Sangheili's helmet, right into the vision-diode, with a shriek of sparks and metal. The assassin grunted again and staggered back, ripping the helmet off his face.

Talner jittered and jumped to his feet. His head swam when the assassin Sangheili reared back and threw his own helmet at him like a projectile. It bounced off Talner's forehead, and blood started to leak down the bridge of his nose.

Overhead, another Dromon exploded as a final rocket embedded into its hull. The burst sent chunks of synthetic metal everywhere. One of them bounced like a bowling ball that had loosed off its own track. The torso-sized plate trailed fire, and ricocheted off the assassin's gut with an organic **_crunch~! _**–as it shattered several ribs.

Doubling over, Soyljuk fell to a kneel and was just grabbing for the pistol on his belt. A Stut-Pistol barked and Soyljuk's world went dark, his aged face relaxing as a purple-leaking hole appeared right between his eyes in the center of his snout.

The elder died silently, and Talner lowered his gun, his bloody face twisted in fear, anger and effort.

Arms slipped under his shoulders, and he felt the sand sliding under his back. Everything was caught in a surreal haze as the plasma scoring, the cuts, the ruined arm and the head-wound took their tolls. All Talner understood was pain.

Kel was over him, her beak bleeding dark magenta blood, her one eye swelling shut.

A muffled explosion sounded nearby, and for a moment, as both them stared at one another, they went temporarily blind.

* * *

{👾}

"_Hold onto something!_" Yamva took his claw off the key of his datapad, and a second later, the _Eschell_ jolted so hard that Taptap thought they had crashed.

Deep inside Gingerback Cavern, all of the burn tanks that Yamva had rigged to explode did exactly that. A small team of six men from Kuhaga's group who were just about to be slaughtered by two squads of R'ha Sangheili were vaporized along with their would-be murderers when they, the aliens, and the drums they had been sent to retrieve all vanished in a green/yellow miasma of fire, heat and collapsing rock.

The mushroom cloud filled the entire sky over the area in an instant as the plasma-fueled air current fled for the top of the trench. The smog blinded the crews of the Dromon dropships and stalled all of the firefights still going on around the Tower's ground levels. There was a flash of light, and soon, everything had vanished in soot.

The skies were clear.

Yamva didn't wait for Taptap to recover. He jammed the throttle and keyed in the proper runes. The schooner shuddered through the mess as he aimed the nose up at the heavens and gunned it for clearer space.

There was nothing but rumbling for a very long time. G-forces beyond his control compressed him into his chair, and sent Taptap wailing as he rolled like a sports ball down the cargo bay and face-planted into a plasma drum in the back. Yamva begged the contents not to react unfavorably to such roughness.

Up and up the _Eschell_ went. The sky shuddered in the cockpit's glass, and clouds parted around the schooner's drab nose.

To the combatants below, Yamva and Taptap were just a green speck that soon did vanish into the blue aether.

* * *

{👾}

Tollen drained the mag of his gun and the Sangheili folded over the rocks he had been climbing over. One of his men tossed back as plasma boiled his chest and incinerated his face. He shouldered the falling body aside and switched feeds for his Assault Rifle.

_Aren't you just a huge bugger._

Tollen grinned like a madman as he witnessed the largest Sangheili of the bunch slice effortlessly through a pair of Kuhaga's crew with an Energy Sword. A rifle in the alien's other claw flared and one of his mercs spun like an interpretive dancer as plasma ripped through his sternum and shoulder.

Tollen ran through another mag as he held down the trigger. Energy fields flared around the Elite's towering form as his armor negated the bullets. The champion charged Tollen silently, his draconic, golden and yellow helmet angled downwards in a predatory challenge of intent.

Backing away, Tollen vaulted some rocks and chucked a fragmentation grenade with the ease of a Frisbee. It detonated on the warlord's flank and ripped away the rest of his shields, including one of the beautiful pauldrons decorating the alien's arm.

"_That's right, come on and fight me, you Covvie' dog!_" Tollen laughed, throwing away his rifle and reaching for a machete on his hip.

* * *

{👾}

"They come up the lift!" Grak chattered in broken English, his eyes on one of the visual monitors displaying the activity beneath the Phantom's belly. "Two them. Friendly?"

"No idea." Liop growled, rangling with the controls as a Dromon flew dangerously close to their flank through all the smoke. The troop bay, stuffed with ore-plasma drums, clanked and rung silently from the deathly swerving. Grak eyed the cargo fearfully, remembering that they were essentially operating a flying bomb.

"Be more careful!" He chattered, staring at the opened chute for the gravity lift as two shadows started to get bigger and bigger. "Now because you can't fly, I have to kill boarders!"

"So kill and kill quietly!" Liop snapped.

A second later, and Kel Yn Gor materialized from the bottom of the chute. The lift carried her and the human she had been dragging limply forwards. She stumbled on her heels and Talner rolled across the deck, close by to Grak's feet.

On reaction, the Ruuhtian turned his plasma pistol down at the limp body and went to shoot it. Kel Yn Gor's rifle whipped up and cut down her former ally without a second thought.

Liop was just glancing back to see what happened when Kel shot and killed him too. Plasma bolts slapped into Liop's beak and incinerated half his skull. His body tossed from the controls, and the Phantom lurched as it hovered to stillness.

Talner grunted something to her as she stowed her gun and strode into the pilot's bay, her amber eyes straying worriedly on him as she passed.

_Stay alive, Talner,_ she thought, shoving Liop's corpse off the rune dais. She clicked the hover-keys needed and gripped the Phantom's operation rails, waiting for the dropship to start nosing for the upper atmosphere. _Stay alive._

As Kel frantically wrestled with the craft's direction, she witnessed something spectacular.

The Tower site started to shrink farther and farther below. The earth itself buckled as the mushroom cloud from the second ore-plasma burst subsided. Gigantic cracks began to form under and between the feet of the surviving combatants, all of them originating from and spreading from the edge of the Crag Belt.

The T'vaoan's eyes were fixed in wide fascination. An entire chunk of the trench's edge started to slide away from the surface of the planet, creating a tumbling fall of rock, earth and dead bodies that gradually vanished over the edge of the cliff. The explosion was causing the trench to fill itself up.

Kel gunned the repulsors and leaned tiredly on the console to watch, but other than that, she did not lift a claw, or even a thought of concern for Kuhaga and Tollen's bands. Nothing else mattered to her anymore.

Faintly, though, in the distance, she could see the last _Eschell _schooner zooming off in an opposite flight path to theirs. The cigar-shaped vessel was zipping away faster than any of the few surviving Dromons could target, and by few, perhaps two to three remained, lazing in circles in the smoky sky around the collapsing digsite.

The landscape buckled one last time and shifted. The Tower, the landing zone, the ramshackle lift and a small army of dead bodies and still living Sangheili were swallowed by the Crag Belt. A third mushroom cloud- this one tan and brown –rose from the trench's gullet.

"…That's certainly a way to end a firefight, huh?" Talner appeared, limping, over her shoulder. He was bleeding everywhere, and a haphazard lump of biofoam stuck out from his forehead where he had made quick fixes.

Kel Yn Gor craned her crimson neck over to look at him, saw the growth-like protuberance jutting from his bruised face, and began to fill the Phantom's pilot bay with resonating, avian-clucks.

She was laughing at him.

"What's so funny?" He drunkenly grinned, his lips fat from the bruising, making his face look all the more comical.

Kel buried her snout in his chest, weakly clasping her arms around his waist, and the two of them slid down to the decking, exhausted and hurting.

* * *

{👾}


	8. Chapter 8

**Featherkisser**

**8**

* * *

There was a knock on the door.

"Yep?" Talner called out.

The door squeaked open and Tepson's boots quietly wrapped on the polished floor.

"Evening, Tal'." He smiled behind a full bronze mustache, taking off his uniform cap as he closed the entryway behind him, the shades rattling against the glass. "I, uh… I just wanted to stop by, before, you know…"

"A'course. I'd be afraid if ya' didn't." Talner croaked as he scooted underneath the papery blankets covering him. His arm extended between Tepson and the metal bed frame. Tepson stared at the slight indent running a straight line down Talner's fore. "It doesn't hurt anymore." The Helljumper grinned when he hesitated.

"Right." Tepson took his hand and shook curtly once, still being gentle even as he did so. "Is everything else holding up to standard?"

"As best as it can." Talner nodded, leaning back against the pillow. Tepson was staring at his face, not to make eye contact, but to gawk at the healing, yet still-present damage. His lower lip was still as large as a thumb from where he'd been batted around. The gash was going away on his forehead and he could see the plasma scoring starting to fade, albeit very slowly, as the nanite-injectors wired into Talner's arms continued their good work. "So, how are ya?"

"Better than you, you crazy animal." Tepson held his cap to his stomach and laughed. "It's not every day someone whose supposed to be _retired_ walks off with a pirate crew steaming and dead behind them."

"Yeah." Talner smirked straight through the lie, giving off the plainest expression he could manage. "It was a rough ride."

"I don't mean to impose-"

"What's on your mind, Teppy'?"

"Tell me what happened again, just one more time." Tepson asked. "Off-duty deployment? _Black ops?_ And pirates?"

"It's all truer and true." Talner nodded, his eyes wandering to the window of the hospital room. Outside, the blue-tinged city of Eserius loomed like a series of irate pylons, littered with little windows and advertisement billboards. A UNSC marked Pelican droned quietly in the distance as it passed between a pair of skyscrapers. "I can't go through a lot of the details…"

"But you got boarded by a bunch of angry Sangheili raiders, that much you can tell."

"I can."

"How many did you kill?"

Talner smiled weakly and shrugged.

"You're tough as shit, Talner." Tepson guffawed after a moment of silence, shaking his head and patting his cap into his palm. "I hope I don't sound too clingy. I don't hear from anyone anymore, nobody from the old units, especially the Helljumper divisions."

"People want to forget." Talner shrugged again. "I'm glad _you_ didn't though."

"Anything." Tepson pointed his cap at him. "You need anything, you always come to me. Long live Primion."

"Long live Primion." The mercenary sighed, mumbling. "You didn't get on the horn about-"

"My lips are sealed." Tepson stalked over to the side of the room, gesturing his cap to the visitor's chair placed by the side of the cot. "You don't mind if I-"

"It's your clinic."

Tepson sat and brushed off his fatigues, grinning at Talner and twisting one of the ends of his mustache.

"I just really can't believe it's you, Talner. All of this time, you've been in…?" He marveled.

"Not the whole time. It's been a lot of wanderin', I reckon."

"I'll bet. That's where a lot of the guys ended up, and there isn't anything bad about that, yeah?" Tepson kept fiddling with his cap.

"Yeah."

The only thing to meet both of their ears in the resultant silence was the distant chatter of doctors and a slight boon from a speaker being used, the drone of another Pelican flying outside the window and off into the nighttime city.

Tepson laughed for no particular reason and stared down at his lap, his face blue from the resonance of the building lights playing off the room's glass.

"Listen, I've been around the bend long enough to know when another human being is lying." Tepson said without any change in his tone. "I'm not taking insult in that, and I'm not even really saying you tried. But if you want to know how I would've known that without my own intuition, I mean, I'll give that to you anyhow. There isn't any paperwork, and nobody showed up to collect you. Intelligence is keen on those things, Tal', they don't leave strays."

"Yeah." Talner kept on smiling, settling into the uncomfortable bed. "It's been a rough few days."

"So, _yes._" Tepson nodded. "Civilians might go for that dog shit, but you never had me or my assistant going. It'll work for the doctors, and it'll even pass on the clipboards, but you're _retired,_ and you've been. And now, you walk up to my clinic with plasma wounds, what is clearly the result," He gestured to Talner's arm. "-of an _energy blade,_ on your wrist there. No I.D., no tags, no money and no civvie' clothes."

Tepson paused.

"And an alien. You… you walked into my clinic with an alien. That's… that's hard not to notice."

"That all's swell and true." Talner agreed. "Was that it?"

"Yes, that was all I wanted to cover." The officer smacked his knees and adjusted in his seat, putting his cap back on top of his head, settling for playing with his mustache again instead. Tepson had always been someone who needed to fidget with things, even before Primion, back in the corps. "I'm literally just a catalyst, Tal'. I just want you to know that with anyone else, your insanity would've been an immediate court marshall. _Wait,_ no, I'm sorry, you're decommissioned, I keep forgetting… It would've been just a plain old _arrest,_ and then, hell, I don't know what happens to you, but it isn't pleasant."

"Yep."

"…No interest in any of that though, huh?" Tepson shook his head.

"Nope." Talner rebuked. "How's my alien doing?"

"We get enough Sangheili in here to know the difference between up or down with non-humans, so, she's doing excellent, I'd say." The officer explained. "Almost as soon as we were done with her, she just up and walked out. No thankyous, no nothing. Does she… speak _English?_"

"Did she not talk?"

"Not at all."

"Then not to you she don't." Talner shrugged. "She's been through a lot."

"I'd say, probably with you there every step of the way, judging by you, old Talner _Deadshot_ McGee of the Helljumpers referring to _it _as a _she._" Tepson hummed. "She's with the car. And _no,_ she's not coming back in here to visit. Those nanites in your arm still have a bit to go, but once they're done, just… just take it and leave it at the drop point, go where you need to go, and I'll take care of it from there."

"You're a life-saver, Teppy', literally, and more literally." Talner reached up again and they both shook hands. The chair creaked, and Tepson turned for the door.

"I don't want to know where you were." Just as he grabbed the handle, he turned and pointed at the Helljumper. "No passing details or anything of the plain sort. You were never here."

"I appreciate that, Sergeant."

"_Quartermaster._ It's Quartermaster now, I'm not in that game anymore." Tepson tipped his cap and stepped through the door. "And it's good to see you again, Lieutenant. Don't dent that sedan."

"I wouldn't dream of it." Talner called as the lock clicked. He sat back and stewed in the silence, watching the beautiful view of Eserius, waiting anxiously to get out of the cardboard-feeling of his medical cot.

* * *

{👾}

Kel Yn Gor hadn't been anywhere else in the galaxy that had even lightly smacked of home. Literally nowhere, out of tens of worlds, ships, and orbital installations. Nowhere had ever reminded her of _home._ Especially not here. Eserius city was… _bigger,_ and it was taller.

The T'vaoan craned her beak upwards to observe the many spanning skyscrapers poking out from over the medical wing's roof and the low wall penning the rest of the clinic facility in. Colorful, moving billboards showing advertisements for local clubs, healthcare products and soft drinks flickered in bands of pink, red, blue and yellow up in the nighttime ambiance.

The shrill reports of what she had learned were _car horns_ played out constantly in the backdrop. Smoke rose from a cluster of stacks poking out from the northern district of the area, and blinking red and green lights topped many immensely tall antennas sprouting from the roofs of the towers.

White spotlights shining down on the parking lot paired perfectly with the crisp air. Light snow flurries were dancing down from the black sky and catching themselves starkly in the illumination of the street winding through the facility's heart.

Kel chattered inside her beak and pulled the human coat she was wearing tighter over her body. Her avian anatomy didn't allow her to fit through the sleaves or even slip it somewhat comfortably over her narrow back. She had settled for wrapping the thing loosely over herself like a blanket to ward off the cold. If nothing else, the transition from the arid environment of Tg-66 to… _this_ was the most startling to her skin, and the cold made many of her recently patched up injuries ache tenderly.

Ruffling her feathers, Kel raised an arm and chewed at the bristles sprouting from her elbow to fix their points. A few passing staff members stared as they walked out of the front spiraling doors of the hospital, but enough aliens frequented here that she didn't completely stick out like a sore thumb.

She leaned back against the black bubble-sedan behind her, swishing one of her palms over the peculiar dome covering the entirety of the vehicle's roofing with fascination. She hadn't been on a human world in years. This was all so… _different_ for her. But it wasn't in a bad way. It was just interesting. It was _eccentric_ to her, but then again, humans were eccentric creatures. It was probably why she liked Talner so much.

Idly cawing with a little- '_Raawt~' _–of fixation, Kel dug into the coat pocket and pulled out one of the chocolate bars she'd stolen off a mess-cart that she'd passed in the hospital halls. It was cold enough out that it wouldn't melt anyhow. She tore off the silvery wrapper and tossed it on the sidewalk, munching her bar happily as she waited.

"You shouldn't litter."-Said a small voice right underneath her chin.

Kel squawked in surprise and looked down at what was revealed to be a small human child, no taller than her waist. He had bushy hair, and dark skin with crystal blue eyes. He was actually very beautiful. He wore a little dark shirt and a white tag that read- _Visitor Pass –_on his chest. He held up her candy wrapper with an innocent expression, his words not having been meant as a jab or gesture. Just a statement.

She opened her beak to say something, but then the little boy's mother hurried over and whisked him away, eyeing her with suspicion as she pulled her dress closer and shielded the boy behind the blouse.

"_Don't wander away from me._" –Kel heard the woman say quietly. The boy dropped her wrapper in the brief theft of his person. Kel chattered and bent down to collect it before crumpling it into her coat pocket. She cawed and ate the rest of her bar, staring at the little boy's back and thinking of Talner.

_Talner._

Where was he? Swallowing, the Kig-yar leant off the car and watched the series of doors at the foot of the hospital. Soon enough, a familiar man stepped through the glass revolvers, dressed in a pair of fatigues and a slim jumpsuit top, looking almost as fresh as before everything that had happened.

Kel actually skipped a bit on her cloven heels in excitement, she fisted the car's glass-reel and waited for the top half of the cockpit to lift away so she could lean inside. She pressed her palm to the steering wheel and honked it twice, waving a claw frantically to get his attention.

"_Talner!_" She squawked, sprinting away from the car the moment he started coming over. Of course, being _T'vaoan,_ she ran nearly forty-five miles per hour at her best, and she was on him in but three footfalls.

Talner was rocked back onto his heels with a loud- '_OOF~!' –_coming from him. She jumped off the sidewalk and wrapped herself around his torso, hooking his waist with her legs, her coat fluttering to the ground behind her like a black ghost. The Kig-yar was chattering incessantly, pruning and cooing, touching the tip of her snout to his lips and nose.

"_Talner~._" She said possessively, and pressed her face into his throat, her feathers shivering in delight.

"Hey, darlin'." Talner embraced her and patted her shoulder, sounding even more impossibly tired than she did. "Did they treat you alright? I don't have to go back in there and bust someone's face do I?"

Kel cooed happily and leaned back, still thigh-clenched to his waist. She held his shoulders and doted on him, a wide smile spreading down her toothy muzzle.

"You do not look like anything happened at all." She mumbled, clenching her claws on him, allowing her felinoid eyes to sweep down his shaven chin and to his chest.

"You're just bein' generous. I've got a bar-brawler's lip, a cripple's limp and a headache for twenty people." He listed off, fixing some of her feathered plumage with a few pinches, brushing snowflakes from their dusty gunmetal lengths. "But none of that stopped you."

"Certainly not." Kel put a foot back on the pavement and stepped down from him, appearing sheepish. She refused to meet his eyes and ran a claw through her plumes, blushing a deep purple profusely. "It is quite cold here…"

"C'mon," Talner reached out with his hand and nodded to the car. "what do you say me and you get outta' dodge?"

Kel Yn Gor cawed, flushed, and slipped her fingers through his as he guided her back to the car, and she picked up her coat from the ground. Holding his hand was a strange but not unwelcome thing to do. It was… _different,_ and Kel, as she looked back once again at all the colorful skyscrapers layering the backdrop, decided that _different_ wasn't all that bad.

* * *

{👾}

Every time one of the street lights passed over the car, it presented a brief moment where the interior was a bright whitish-yellow. Kel jumped every now again for the first few passes, but Talner laughed at her and she grumbled at him and vowed to stop being so skittish.

She was a former pirate, she'd seen worse on better days. The T'vaoan scoffed quietly at how her life had led to her to this point now, such an extremely different place. She sat awkwardly in the passenger seat as Talner drove. Her amber eyes danced over all the glowing radio runes and touchscreen pleasures gridding the car's dashboard.

That, and she kept looking at Talner, just being happy for the fact that they were both alive and in the same space being in one another's company. The Kig-yar's heart flurried like the light snowfall outside, and she crooned, shaking her head to clear it.

"Everything is pretty much scot-free. There's no links, no beginning and no end." Talner was speaking very lowly as he braked for some traffic at a red light. It was a good thing the time of night and the fact that the sedan's windows were tinted. The Alliance still hadn't completely worked out the idea of mixed population on a lot of worlds, and Cohesion was one of them. Eserius city was mostly human. The last thing either of them needed after all that had happened the past few solar days was some punk extremist giving them shit. "And, after all that, nobody found the ore either."

"It is safe? Really?" Kel bristled.

"Really really." Talner winked. "So that means we pretty much got ourselves a card to do whatever we want."

"That is… _exciting._" She almost whispered, leaning an elbow on the center console to watch him with awe. "But that still does not entirely clear up what we have before us. There is still the listing of a potential buyer. Neither you or I possess identities in any local sector, so we do not have a space to wire the funds or-"

"_Kel,_" Talner took his eyes off the city road for just a second to smile at her. "we got time, if nothin' else. One problem per step."

"_Yes._ Yes, one problem per step… This is reasonable." The Kig-yar sat back into the leather and fidgeted underneath her beak. Soon, she was laughing very quietly. "I am in disbelief that this all happened."

"Me too."

"Talner,"

"Yes, my dear?"

"Tell me about _se-dans. _What do all of these buttons do? None of the people at the clinic would tell me."

Talner laughed and started to show her.

* * *

{👾}

Talner found the drop off point via the car's GPS console.

"Who is that that you are communicating with?" Kel asked when the little feminine voice inside the console vocally announced directions.

"Nobody, it's just the GPS." He laughed at her.

"Is that similar in functionality to a _luminary?_" She blinked, tapping the little screen with a talon.

"Almost the same, you got it." He nodded. "There aren't any cars on T'vao?"

Kel leaned back from the console and smiled toothily at him.

"What?" He blinked.

"You pronounced it correctly that time." She beamed, sifting in her seat as he brought the car to a stop and put it in park. They were in an old lot, between some warehouses cordoned off with chains at their shutters, bearing the mark of Eserius Police Department on several notifications hung up. "_T'vaoans_ walk through the elevator bridges and tunnel-streets to get to where they must. Buildings are limited to each family too. There is no such thing there as…" She pointed outside to one of the skyscrapers back they way they came.

In that moment, as her long face was upturned to look through the sedan's bubble, Talner caught her in a regal pose. Feathered, lithe, dinosoid and entirely alien. Kel Yn Gor was fascinatingly beautiful, and as his eyes lingered down her jaw, to the jumpsuit covering her shoulders, he began to pick out things that he had not the entire way here.

The suit clung to her form fittingly, and it was just now that he was focusing on her scent. She smelled sweet, not quite like flowers, but as a natural odor. _Clean,_ probably helped by the tub the hospital staff had given her during her treatment as they had to him. Her shoulders were defined, her clavicle outlined, two breasts were pert to her ribs, and her powerful _T'vaoan_ thighs strained against the reflective rubberized material of her suit.

Kel Yn Gor watched as he examined her in the dark, her eyes growing heavier with a rising sense of need in the back of her throat.

"We have never expressed the truth to one another." She suddenly said.

"I know that." Talner licked his dry lips, cleared his throat and focused on her face again, feeling himself being rude. "There's been a lot of bad shit goin' on."

"_Bad-shit_ no longer." Kel nodded, gripping the center console, and leaning her snout closer to his face, her fiery eyes locked on his and determined in the din of the car's interior. "Tell me what you want."

Talner held his breath and struggled to find the right words. He huffed, but didn't pull away from her. Her inhuman scent was overwhelming now, and he could feel her cool breath puffing over his lips from the proximity of her avian muzzle.

Kel's red throat quivered as she suppressed an excited trill. Her body was spiking her with all kinds of wants and thirsts. But she controlled herself from indulging immediately in something so taboo. She wanted to hear him say it.

"We are so different, you and I." She quietly said, inching her snout even closer.

"_Yeah._ Yeah we are, but that don't-" Talner stuttered, scratching his head. "-that didn't matter and still doesn't. _Kel Yn Gor,_ when you and I met each other, I… I discovered things about myself that I would have never discovered before. Finding, and befriending someone who I once viewed as-"

Kel sat back in her chair and huffed. Talner clenched at his own lips and sighed.

"I am so sorry." He mumbled. "That was… aw, _shit,_ a mood killer!"

"Why are males so _idiotic_, I have wondered since I was a chick." Kel rolled her eyes, and then sat up. "I am used to things being much more simple. My career on T'vao? I always took what I wanted."

She put her beak in Talner's face, and her long, slippery, serpentine tongue tasted him from the bottom of his chin, all the way up to his cheekbone. She sampled him, and then placed her snout beside his ear.

"_I fantasize of what you would feel like inside of me almost every night._" She told him.

Talner brought his foot down on the seat's adjustment bar, slid it back until his heels were underneath the steering wheel, and Kel Yn Gor sprang over the center console and straddled his hips, causing the whole car to rock.

Talner dug his fingers into the supple rubber-material of her jumpsuit, appreciating how her soft body pliantly melded into the crook between his arms, and against his chest and belly. Kel was warm, and the flesh of her generous rear end was an ample place for his hands to find themselves.

He squeezed her rump and tugged her into his groin. Kel gasped cindering air and merged their foreheads together. The T'vaoan hiked her cloven heels onto the center console and the edge of the cockpit bubble on the other side. She rolled her meaty hips into him repeatedly, crooning loudly when he ducked beneath her jaw, and kissed tenderly the crimson bubble that made her throat.

Kel used her claws to pry into the sealant line going down between her breasts. She sat up on him and proceeded to slowly tab her torso open. A pair of black, reflective orbs began to reveal their cleavage in the wintery dark of the sedan. She looked up at him, past her brow ridges, panting.

Talner met her gaze, and the two of them hummed at each other to reassure themselves. Talner started to snicker, even as he fumbled with the fatigue's fly and strap.

"What?_ What?_' Kel flushed, smiling, as she covered her cleavage with a paw. "I was trying to make it look enticing. I am… not very good at this."

"You're amazing at this." Talner shook his head as he finished yanking his pants down. Kel peered between her boobs and blinked at the floppy organ that touched against her still covered belly. "And I'm just laughing because who'd ever have thought I'd be fuckin' with an alien in a car of all places?"

Kel squawked and flicked him on the nose with one of her talons, but that only made him laugh harder.

"_Arrogant male._" She chuckled, running a nail up and down the underside of his organ.

_That_ shut Talner up in a hurry. The sharpshooter hissed and sat upwards in the seat, glancing down as the Kig-yar wrapped her fingers around his dick, fumbling with it.

"Nono, just… just hold it, like.. like… _tsch~_" He kept giggling at her as he watched her struggle. It was funny, because Kel was trying to hold it like a gun handle. Kig-yar didn't have just a _thumb_ necessarily, they had… _kind of two?_ Her hand anatomy was confusing as hell, but in the moment… "-_Ouch! _Quit floppin' my Johnson, woman."

"Your _what?_" She squawked, gradually devolving into the same hysterics that he was. He had never seen Kel Yn Gor beaming like she was now. They were supposed to be having sex for Christ's sake, and neither of them could just stop having fun together. "Do not badger me, filthy _hu-man,_ you can not hassle me for lack of experience. Kig-yar men _retract_ and are much more narrow. This creature is alien to me."

"_Hoo~! _Ain't that a card, the alien thinks my _pecker_ is an _alien._" Talner cackled so hard that the car shook. "Yep. Get 'em! Quick! He's leaning that'a-way!"

"You are terrible." Kel blushed a deep purple, finding a good grip, she started to pump her leathery palm up and down, bundling his organ's skin on each side with each stroke. She smiled venomously when his jeers gradually subsided. She was very smug as Talner's grin started to fade, and his eyes got that hunger in them again from when they'd first started this. "Take some of that blood-flow from your brain and put it to where it is needed." She cooed.

"Y-Yes, ma'am." He touched their foreheads again and grabbed her ass, squeezing her through the suit, and making her gasp. "Ya' know, when we were flyin' to that stupid rock, I thought about ways I could get you to fool around without having to go through so much trouble…"

"Indeed?" Kel panted, grinding her groin against his balls as she kept pumping. The car rocked on its suspension lightly to match their rate. "So you thought I was a Kig-yar with a human fetish, _and_ shallow on top of it?"

"_Naw',_ I just knew I could get any woman I wanted with my wily charms, no matter her species or disposition on the galactic scale." Talner growled, helping her with the latch on her torso. He slid the tab down until her breasts popped out, jiggling like onyx water balloons in the dark. "I thought about dipping my wang in melted chocolate."

"You dirty pig." She squawked in laughter, and licked her teeth at him, flexing her brows. "My carnivorous traits would assure that wouldn't end well."

"There's probably a guy or two out there somewhere who survived a blowjob from a Jackal." He shrugged. "There's gotta' be a Jackal or two out there that survived a human going down on them."

"What is-"

Talner hooked his arms under her thighs and lifted her up, flexing to his knees on the seat, he draped her over the steering wheel gently, kissing her red throat again. His hands swept from her hips and gripped her chest's assets. He scrunched the black melons together until the little bird-nips on their ends bulged between his thumbs and pointers. Kel opened her muzzle and crooned loudly, spreading her legs and rolling her hips into his exposed groin.

"_Talner~._" She moaned. "_Talner stop playing now… Talner rut, and rut and… and mate me~…_"

He would've laughed if the euphoria didn't have him stupid-drunk. Her English was bloody slipping, and it made him proud to see that he had that effect on her.

Still, he had a job to do.

Sliding lower, Talner pulled the tab down lower and lower, peeling the exterior skin that hid her dark, soft treasure-flesh from him. He yanked the suit past her digitigrade knees and stared at the Kig-yar vaginal opening winking at him between her legs.

It was blackish on the inside too, drooling with clear fluids that snaked down her crotch and between her heavy butt cheeks. It shivered, and a noticeable nub protruded from the very top. It was… _different _from a human's. Radically so, especially with the shape. The tunnel actually went _upwards_, towards her belly. It was probably to assist in the back-mounting that Kig-yar were supposed to employ during mating.

Kel Yn Gor was splayed on the steering wheel and watching him with curiosity.

"What is it that you are doing?" She breathed, her feathers quivering all over. "Talner, you do not have to impose upon yourself anything that I-"

He shoved his lips into her alien vent and stabbed it right in the center with his tongue. The sedan's horn screamed and Kel cried out long and softly, rearing her head back, and staring at the glass dome over her head.

"_…Gods~!_" She gasped, and a small, tumbling ramble of native _T'vao_ rolled off her tongue. Talner had no idea what she had just said and didn't care. He swirled his tongue inside her tunnel and pinched the nub with his fingers. Kel's insides shuddered as she finally began to live through the very same fantasies that had invaded her nights for such a long time since she'd started canvassing him as a potential extra-species mate.

The horn blared again as he ate her out. The Kig-yar was lost as his textured tongue elicited all kinds of pleasure-jolts that rocked her hips and stayed her tummy. A feeling of emptiness in her guts was just relieved if only half-way. She ground into his face and tugged on her breasts, yanking them around as he kept coring through her.

"-_How's that?_" He blubbered between licks, rising and looking at her between her black tits with a stupid grin on his face. Kel gave off a little- '_Cerrr-rawt~!' _–sound, gripped his hair and shoved him back down without a word.

**_Beep~! Beeeeppp~! _**–went the sedan. Kel clawed the steering wheel rims and moaned it all out, not caring about the racket.

They played in that position for a while, but eventually, Kel began to prod and nag him for the main act, and so Talner eventually sat back in his seat and let the Kig-yar crawl over and mount him again, her metallic taste still fresh on his tongue.

This time, his fatigues flew off and bundled in the back seating. She ripped his shirt off with her teeth just as he got over his neck, and she spit it on top of his pants, ramming her slit all over the underside of his erect blade, letting it slip and jolt in every direction.

"_Inside~._" She purred, twirling her snake-tongue over his neck as she settled in the crook of his neck and shoulders. Their bodies were like lock and key. Kel crooned as she mashed her breasts against his chest, her claws dancing around all the scars matting down his ribs, the same she had admired as signs of strength and vitality. "…_Talner~… Talner~…_" She sang.

The sniper reached between their bellies and lined himself with her, taking the first slippery plunge with inaccuracy. He huffed in frustration as he tried to navigate his head into her passageway, but her anatomy made it a struggle.

At least, it wasn't impossible. It was all about finding the right angle. Things still fit, and it wasn't jarring. Did it feel different? _Most certainly yes, it did._

"-_Aht~! _Jeez', you're fuckin' tight…" He grit his teeth. "Holy shit."

"-_Tal-NEERRR~_" She squawked, opening her beak and biting around the edges of his mouth, locking his lower-face in her jaws. She started to twirl and slap her tongue all over his lips in some mockery of a _kiss,_ even though their faces could not accommodate one another in such a manner.

Talner did his best to awkwardly substitute a proper French kiss. He opened his mouth and dueled with her tongue, hooking his hands on her waist, he eased the Kig-yar slowly up and down in their merger. Kel chattered and trilled with each individual thrust for the first few movements. Then, she settled into a slight bounce, her heavy, darkly colored rear slapping against his thighs with jiggling ferocity. The sedan's suspension creaked and rocked with each impact, and Talner could've sworn that at one point, the car's belly had grazed the street beneath. He fucked the T'vaoan in earnest, screwing his flesh-blade into her warm, gooey tunnel with abandon.

"-_Raaaaww-AWWWT~! Yes~! Yes~…. Rut… Mating… Very good… MmmmmTALNER~…._" Kel sounded ridiculous. She could not get close enough as she slapped again and again into his lap, driving his human tool ever deeper into her canal with forceful pushes and bobs. He spread her nicely, impaling her on his rod as juices began to roll down to his testes and mark the leather on the seat cushion beneath them.

He had a feeling that Tepson or one of his clinic workers would eagle-eye that evidence in a heartbeat. But, honestly, Tepson was a good enough buddy that Talner wasn't concerned if he knew or didn't know that he was enjoying fleshly pleasantries outside his own species.

This galaxy was insane anyhow. He could fuck with whoever he wanted.

He thought about warning Kel Yn Gor about that last bit, but somehow, he already knew her answer to the conundrum. A tightening heat started to swell in his loins as he humped into the T'vaoan with abandon, stabilizing her hips with his hands. He grunted repeatedly, stabbing upwards with so much force again and again that his legs started to ache and then go numb.

Kel gripped his stomach and craned over him, chattering at the car's bubble-ceiling, with her tongue bobbing out of her beak and bouncing in a similar fashion to her black breasts. The Kig-yar trilled and let her feathers bristle their farthest from her shoulders and scalp. Her eyes were narrow and hazed with drunken euphoria.

With a final few bucks into her hole, Talner gasped and sat upwards, a cacophony of what normally would've been embarrassing sounds drawling out of his throat. He shoved his face into her chest and squeezed her butt until purple swells appeared on the rolls between his fingers. His balls unloaded in a siphoning exfoliation of pleasurable pulsing that drained all ounces of strength from his pelvis and gut.

Again and again, bursts of seminal plasma shot up into the Kig-yar's alien cunt and pooled there like running reserves of white syrup. Talner jettisoned so much of his cum into the saurian that it actually started to leak back out between their movements, running down his spire to the base before breaking off into several differing trails of milky refuse. _That_ dripped on the seat leather too and further ruined it.

Not that either of them gave a shit about the car.

Kel slumped forwards until she was losing her snout in his hair. She panted wildly, intrigued and pleased bird-like croons continuously leaving her muzzle. She purred and her chest quivered to prove it, licking his hair as she kept rolling her hips into their expended merger.

Talner couldn't see straight as he slumped back down into the driver's seat, blinking several times when he realized that he had gone cross-eyed.

Soon, with nothing but the cold wind outside, the car's heating vents whispering and the battery humming, their panting died in volume, and the pair sat amongst each other in reverent silence. Talner regulated his breathing and smiled at her, adjusting some of her frazzled plumage with a few pinches and light strokes.

"…_Your feathers got all messed up._" He mumbled in musing.

Kel cooed like a bird and bent down to slowly drag her tongue across his cheek again. She sat atop him and did not remove him from her insides, her eagle-eyes blooming like two orbs of fire in the night.

_Mine,_ she said with her narrowed pupils, holding the sides of his sweaty face in her claws.

"….I, uh…. I guess this means we're a thing now." He said.

Kel rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue, flicking him in the nose again with a talon.

"_Ow._ What'd I do?"

"Idiot male." Kel smothered him again, stroking her arms down him and inhaling his scent. " _My idiot, big, strong male… My vital, fast, idiot male… Finally mine._"

* * *

{👾}


	9. Epilogue

**Featherkisser**

**Epilogue**

* * *

Kel Yn Gor huffed at a line she did not like. She used her wrist to scuff out the mistake, and set to work scribbling in a replacement.

The Pinelurch trees were difficult to capture through charcoal, but that had been part of the reason why she had taken to drawing them so much. It was a challenge, something new, something _different._ She was never one to shy away from that.

Accuracy didn't really lend credence to the pursuit of what she was doing, but that was okay. Kel had one night gotten the idea to instill a new craft into her life to even out the daily grind. She liked sketching in the notebooks. She liked sketching trees the most, even if holding the charcoal was a bit of a struggle sometimes.

The stick whispered against the paper, and some songbirds chirped in the distance to compete with a serene breeze of temperate feel. Kel finished a few touches and sighed, leaning the book back into her folded legs beneath her to view the finished product at a distance. The black and grey paper-tree didn't look half bad, but it didn't look half-good to her either.

She decided that she'd have to draw another one later. Self-satisfaction was the kiss of death, after all.

Folding the book closed, she plopped it on the garden table beside the house's door and sighed, watching out through the porch slats at the expansive farmland surrounding the property. It was just miles and miles of green and pink grass, stitched with some unpaved paths, and a few power-mills that peaked over the woods to the north. A trail of dirt rose from a distantly passing tractor, and all was still besides that.

Horizon was a beautiful planet, and, as an added bonus, it was tolerable to her in a social sense.

Kel smiled as she spotted a distant racket of bodies on one of the farm paths. A Kig-yar trekked down the road with three of her tiny chicks scampering and hopping after her. She clucked when the tractor passing by got close, and they hid behind her legs. Her and the human operator of the vehicle shared a brief wave before she went one way and he the other.

Horizon was a mixed world in the near-center of Alliance space. The local government needed fresh families to fill out all the developing countryside, since the terraforming process had been completed two decades ago. Money was evident but not urgent. It still left _plenty_ for them, even after the house, the cars and the wagons for the haul.

Kel Yn Gor took her view off the developing sunset in the distance when the door to her home squeaked open. She watched as Talner, clothed in overalls and sandals trotted across the porch, and bent low to her for a moment to peck her in the center of her forehead.

"Evenin', darlin'." He said.

"Husband." Kel greeted. A chair on the other side of the little table squeaked. Talner sat down and scanned the grasslands and the fields, lost in a moment of silence with her.

He pulled out a dataslate and started scrolling through it. Kel chewed at some of her feathers on her elbow and bristled underneath her robes, reaching gingerly for beside her notebook where a cup of tea sat plainly. She pinched the tip of her snout around the straw and slurped quietly.

"What are you reading?" She asked after putting the glass down.

"Oh, nothin' worth the time I suppose." Talner shrugged, turning off the pad and putting it on the table too. He dusted his pant legs and looked at her. "Did you draw anything?"

"Yes." Kel handed him her notebook. He flipped it open eagerly, and slowly started to go through the pages. He whistled.

"You're amazing." Talner said, making her snout flush. "I told you that this is something you were meant to do. It ain't all just gotta' be one thing."

"In that, you are correct." She let her legs sink down to the floor, and she arched her hunched back in a quivering stretch, slapping her fangs. "Was it a long day?"

"Naw', all's well in the Hundred-Acre-Wood." Talner handed her back her book and smiled at her. "You really like these trees."

"They are _different_ from so many others I have seen." Kel said. "They are a proper muse."

"Mmhm." He stole a sip of her tea, and she crooned playfully at him, reached over the table and snatched it back before greedily slurping on the straw again. She cawed and he laughed at her. "That's good tea there."

"Get your own."

"But I made it."

"-And relieved ownership to me. Get your own." She licked her teeth at the taste, arching a brow at him which made him laugh more.

Five months. It was all it had taken since Cohesion. Horizon didn't have the bustle, or the prejudice of that world. They had sold off their last souvenirs from Tg-66- all those ore drums –and had used the funds to purchase the little house and the few acres of property. It effectively meant that Talner and Kel had found their way out, and neither of them were keen on rebuking that freedom.

_Out._

It was done. Talner hadn't suffered a nightmare in a long time, having another warm body in the same bed as him. And an actual _bed,_ not a cot, or a bag, or the ground. An actual sheeted bed, with blue blankets and green pillows.

Talner smiled happily and waited for Kel Yn Gor to put down her tea again, before he snatched it and sipped it a second time, making her trill and leap off her chair.

"Can I help you?" He grinned as the Kig-yar hopped into his lap, her robes fluttering and laying like blankets across his knees and lap. She arched a brow at him and grabbed her tea from his hand, sipping as she sat on him. "I'll make another pot tomorrow, I guess, seeing as you're three-quarters through this one."

"It's good." She defended, sipping until it was empty. She slapped her chops and put it back on the table. "Besides, it is best to have a husband who can provide as much as the female may nurture."

"_Nurture._" He scoffed. "You're a bit too feisty to come off as the _nurturing _type."

Kel cawed and leaned forwards, sandwiching his nose between her cleavage popping out the top of the robes. She spread her thighs and sat even more squarely on him, rubbing her body and cooing against him.

"I can be so when you wish me to be." She purred.

Talner muffled an affirmative into her chest. The Kig-yar hopped with laughter.

"I am going inside." She told him, getting off his lap, collecting her cup and book. "Are you preparing sustenance this time, or am I?"

"…_Uhm,_" Talner was focused on something out in the fields for a second. He dusted his pants off and smiled up at her. "I'll make it tonight, darlin', just… gimme' a second. I need to sit for a moment, after all the wagon-trawlin' and…"

"I understand." Kel licked his cheek playfully and sauntered into the house like a crane. He reached over and smacked her ass through her robe, making the Kig-yar skip through the doorframe with an excited trill. Talner's laughter was quick and cut off. He grimaced as he recentered his eyes on the fields ahead, his eyes narrowed, and his boots spread on the porch.

After a few minutes, he stood up and approached the stairs, scratching at the stubble on his chin. He glanced once at the house's door and grunted.

"Ya' don't strike me as a local there, stranger." He called out softly over the path winding to their house. "Folks around here don't like it when you saunter on up to their doors unannounced. Isn't that how it is where you come from?"

"Something like that, yes." A deep-throated voice responded. The darkly skinned man reached the precipice of the path and stood just ahead of Talner and Kel's porch, his hands innocently placed in his fatigue pockets. "A fine evening to you, Talner."

"Howdy'do, Kuhaga." Talner nodded.

"May I sit?"

"I don't see why not."

Kuhaga walked up the steps and met Talner face to face. For a long while, the two of them stood in each other's noses and said nothing. Kuhaga's eyes were sunken, and there were scars that hadn't been there before all over his face and his exposed arms. One of his eyes had turned white, and lacked a pupil. The obvious signs of nanite-reformation were present all over the entire left side of Kuhaga's head.

"You wanted to sit?" Talner smiled.

"Yes I did."

Kuhaga allowed himself to be led to Talner's chair. He sat in it with a creak, and Talner took Kel's. Kuhaga sighed and tapped his boots on the porchwood. Talner watched him.

"This is a fine piece that you purchased with the ore money." Kuhaga stated.

"I appreciate you saying."

"I assume times have been good?"

"Better than they were." Talner shrugged. "We don't smoke here."

Kuhaga froze as he reached for a lighter, and smiled politely. He plucked the cigarette out of his lips and stowed it away in his pocket.

"Did Tollen survive?" Talner asked.

"Oh yeah." Kuhaga hummed. "He isn't happy."

"Fuck him."

"I wasn't happy until pretty much fifteen minutes ago, when I just got here, and found your new little life." The former officer let his eyes wander to the path he'd taken. "I was thinking the entire time; how would I catch a _sharpshooter_, like you, unawares. Then I was thinking, how would I catch _two sharpshooters,_ like you and that bird, unaware."

"Her name is _Kel Yn Gor,_ you stupid, sumnabitch'." Talner growled. "And if you call her a bird one more time, I will beat you to death on my porch with my bare hands, without pause for thought or mercy."

"Apologies." Kuhaga quivered and did his best not to clench his fists. "As I was saying, it was all just single-minded up until then. I was going to come here and… I don't know, _shoot you? _Shoot _at_ you? With what, I don't know. I didn't bring any guns, or guys."

"You still have guns and guys?" Talner jabbed. "That in and of itself is a surprising and quite lackluster example to define your dwindling intelligence."

"Don't sit there, on your garden chair, under a roof with an enemy of the human race, and tell me that you don't want to go right back to what you were doing." Kuhaga looked at him over the table. "Do not lie to me about that, please. Have you still been having nightmares? I bet you have."

"The only nightmares I have are the ones I didn't step on back at that rock." The sharpshooter shook his head. "They keep crawlin' back like the roaches they are."

"I'm glad our working relationship left itself on a positive note."

"What the fuck do you want?"

"Like I said, I don't know." Kuhaga shrugged. "I looked at this little house of yours and realized that there wasn't any point. The money got split three ways. It was always going to do that anyhow, get divided between interested parties. I wasn't greedy. I was ready for that."

Talner had to control himself at the audacity of that last statement. Not _greedy? _After he kept them there too long, and things went wrong and-

"Kuhaga, we all at our darkest depths are lost men. Every single one of us." Talner observed, glancing back at the front door to his house. "The point to prove our strength comes from our ability to leave well enough alone."

"You don't have to worry about me." Kuhaga laughed. "I suppose I _owe_ you, for saving me from those hinge-heads, even if you abandoned me to die right after. I'll admit, you and that bi-" Kuhaga flinched. "-_Kel,_ not going out of your ways to purposefully execute me, was mightily appreciated. Aren't you even going to ask me who survived and who didn't?"

"Shoot." Talner leaned back in his chair.

"Shackie and the boys you saved. Tollen even let the Kig-yar live when we parted ways. He lost his entire band. Lost an arm too, to the Kaidon of R'ha." Kuhaga said.

"_Shit,_ that guy was there?"

"Indeed he was. I would say he has it out for you too, seeing as that Elite in the black armor you and your… _significant other_ killed, was his wife's uncle."

Talner looked at Kuhaga incredulously.

"Word's been spreading around, and I'm in hiding technically." He shrugged. "I just… I don't know. I wanted to see for myself. What my best, most ruthless pathfinder had carved out for himself with all that money and ore. I guess I found it."

"I guess you did." Talner snorted. "And does it suit you?"

**_Chsk-Chsskk~!_**

"_Leave._"

Both men looked at the front door. Kel Yn Gor was standing there, and in her claws was a projectile hunting rifle, aimed right for Kuhaga's face.

"_Leave._" She repeated, her beak appearing to not even have moved.

"She's really quite lovely." Kuhaga smiled at Talner.

"She's certainly a keeper." The sharpshooter chuckled. "Now do me and favor, and stop upsettin' my wife, or I will have to call the local authorities about a trespasser on my rightful property."

"They'll be coming to arrest a corpse." Kel said very nonchalantly. "Leave."

"I'm gone." Kuhaga stood from the chair and started to walk off the porch, still wearing his polite smile. "Just think about what I said, Talner. There's a game you left behind, and I'm just warning you. Not everyone's willing to walk away like I am."

"Walkin' is exactly what you should be doing. Not flapping your gums." Talner reminded. "Goodnight, Kuhaga."

"Goodnight, Talner."

Talner and Kel watched Kuhaga walk off, until the man was nothing but a distant, black speck gathering at the summit of a hill in the blaze of the brilliant sunset.

By the time the sun had vanished below the horizon, Kuhaga could no longer be seen, and would never be seen again. Yet, somehow, his presence lingered like that of an angry ghost's, and so Kel did not let go of the hunting rifle for several minutes. Eventually, though, she became disgusted and threw it inside the house, holding the door open and cawing for her mate.

"Talner." She sounded pleading. "Come inside with me."

"I'm coming." Talner finally ripped his eyes from where Kuhaga had wandered off. He picked up his tablet from the table and opened it up as he stepped inside his warm house, managing to swipe-close the tab he'd been reading before Kel saw it.

The top of the paragraph label read _CLASSIFIED._

* * *

**{📚}  
-0-0-0-0-0-**

**-0-**

**Fin**


End file.
